Where does rakazo store files and memory? A map of your server

"My bot says it saved the file, but I can't find it anywhere on my server." That is the most common storage question rakazo self-hosters ask — the file exists, it is just not where you would look for it. We mapped a production-style rakazo install on a real server (October 2026); here is exactly what lives where.

The short version: three Docker volumes

A published-images install keeps everything in three volumes (run docker volume ls on the host to see them):

Volume	What lives there
`rakazo_pgdata`	The Postgres database: your account and password hash, bots, conversations and messages, memory documents, routines, sessions, and encrypted secrets.
`rakazo_appdata`	The bots' computer homes: every file a bot creates, plus artifacts and home snapshots (`home-revisions`).
`rakazo_webassets`	Assets served by the web app.

Nothing important lives in your host home directory. If you go looking with ls ~, you will find the install folder (.env and the compose file) — not your bots' data.

Inside appdata: one folder per bot, one shared folder

Open the appdata volume and the layout is homes/team-<id>/ with a bots/ folder per bot and a shared/ folder for the team. This is a real listing from our test instance — the files are the ones our demo bots created:

homes/team-…/bots/<Chief>/   demo-notes.txt  hello-test.txt
                              launch-plan.md  rakazo-update.md
homes/team-…/bots/<Scout>/   scout-brief.md
homes/team-…/bots/<Ink>/     blog-draft.md  blog-cover.svg
homes/team-…/shared/          (empty until you use it)

To look inside without disturbing anything:

docker run --rm -v rakazo_appdata:/v alpine ls /v/homes

Why Bot B "can't find" Bot A's file

Each bot works in its own bots/<botId> folder, so when Scout saves scout-brief.md in its folder, Ink honestly cannot see it — we watched exactly this happen in our live demo session. That isolation is deliberate (it is the bots' privacy boundary), and there are three sanctioned ways across it:

Put the file in shared/ — the team folder every bot on the same computer can reach;
Send the content by message — paste or attach it in the other bot's chat;
Delegate — bots can hand questions and tasks to each other natively; in our test, Chief asked Scout directly and summarised the answer.

A related confusion, reported in the project's issue tracker: the file tools and a bot's shell can disagree about what "home" means. The bot's home is its folder above — not the host's home, and not the sandbox container's root filesystem (that one is disposable and is rebuilt from the home snapshot).

What this means for backups and upgrades

A database backup does not include bot files. pg_dump covers accounts, conversations and memory (the pgdata side). Files need the appdata volume copied separately. Our backup & rollback guide walks through both.
Upgrades do not wipe files. Volumes persist across container rebuilds; in our verified cross-version upgrade (25 October 2026), every bot file and the remembered code word survived untouched.
Never delete volumes casually. docker compose down -v destroys pgdata and appdata — that is your bots' memory and files, gone. There is no recycle bin.

Setting this up for a client? Our deployment service includes the storage walkthrough and a two-part backup (database + appdata) before we hand the server over.

Verified on our own rakazo server, 25 October 2026 (edge images). The project moves fast — if your layout differs, the official self-hosting docs win.