Backup and restore

Saving the current rule set

When you experiment with Little Snitch, you may want to save a sane state to disk, so that you can restore it after the experiment. This can be done in Little Snitch Configuration. Choose Rules > Backup… from the main menu.

The backup contains the current rule set for all users, all profiles, all known networks and most preference settings. It does not include Network Monitor’s stored connections.

Backups should only be restored on computers with the same user accounts created in the same order. This usually limits restores to your current computer.

Automatic backup via Time Machine

Time Machine automatically creates backups in regular intervals. These backups contain Little Snitch’s configuration, unless you have excluded it explicitly. You can, of course, restore these backups in a similar way as an explicitly saved backup.

Restoring from a backup

In order to restore a backup, open Little Snitch Configuration and choose Rules > Restore from Backup… from the main menu. The backup window first asks whether to restore from a particular file or from a Time Machine backup. In the next step, you can choose a file or a Time Machine backup from a list, which is finally restored in a last step. Since changes are made to all user accounts, you need to enter an administrator password in order to restore.

You should avoid restoring from files with names like configuration.user.xpl. The “user” part in the file means that it contains only data for a particular user. A restore from this type of file is not complete.