Administration

Administrators manage the Marginalia installation: user accounts, database backups, cleanup of deleted data and extensions. The first account, created on the first start, is an administrator; it can make other users administrators too.

Administrators are also normal users with their own books - they don't see other users' books, lorebooks or settings.

The Admin page

Administrators have an Admin button at the bottom of the workspace. It is only in the normal layout: the phone layout (a window narrower than 768 pixels) has no Admin page, so open Marginalia in a wider window (and reload the page) for administration. It opens the admin page with these tabs:

Tab
Users	Creating, editing and deleting accounts, and giving users permissions. See Users.
Database Backups	Backups of the whole database, on demand or on a schedule, and restoring them. See Database backups.
Cleanup	Permanently removing deleted data. See Cleanup.
Resource Files	Finding the files of resources that nothing uses any more, downloading them as a ZIP and deleting them from the disk. See Resource Files.
Help assistant	The chat that answers questions from the manual: the model, the prompts and who pays for it. See Help assistant.
Agents	The system prompt and the compaction prompt that agents follow when neither they nor their user have one of their own. Empty is the built-in prompt; the info icon has Insert Default Template, which fills it in so you can edit a copy. What users may do with agents is their permission. Also Agents may send messages to the webhooks of users: the server calls the address a user typed in their settings when an agent needs them and they have the application closed (When you are not there); turn it off where that is not acceptable.
Extensions	Installing and removing extensions. See Managing extensions.

The data folder

Everything Marginalia stores is in the .marginalia folder in the home directory of the user that runs it (./data on the host with the Docker setup):

Path
marginalia.sqlite (with -wal, -shm)	The database: users, books, lorebooks, settings, everything.
secret.key	Key that encrypts the API keys in the database. Created on the first start; without it, saved API keys can't be read.
db-backups/	Database backups.
data/<login>/backups/manuscripts/<book id>/	Book backups of each user.
extensions/	Installed extension JARs.
agent-workspaces/<agent id>/	The files of an agent (its notes and reports, which it keeps between runs).
agent-runs/<run id>/	What a run of an agent keeps: the start of the book (to show you the changes, removed with the working copy), the checkpoints and the findings (removed when the run is purged by the cleanup).
desktop/logs/	Logs of the desktop app.

To back up a whole installation, stop Marginalia and copy this folder (including secret.key). While it runs, use database backups for the database; book backups and extensions are plain files and can be copied at any time.