Your SillyTavern Backup Zip, Unpacked: What Actually Moves to the Phone

Moving day for a tavern is one button and one zip. Desktop SillyTavern's Download backup packs your entire data/<user>/ directory into a single archive — every character you collected, every conversation you kept, the worldbooks, the presets, the regex scripts you forgot you wrote. Import that zip into Foreverse and the tavern reassembles itself on the phone. This post is the unpacking manifest: each folder in the zip, what it becomes on Android, and the two things that stay in the box on purpose.

characters/ — the residents

Every *.png and *.json in here goes through the same importer as a single-card import: v1, v2, and v3 cards all parse, embedded character books included. Each card lands twice, by design: once in the character library, once as a ready chat world. That is the same double-write the in-app import does. Cards that fail (usually a PNG whose metadata was stripped somewhere in its past life) are reported by name, not silently skipped; the count at the end tells you exactly what made it.

chats/ — the part you actually care about

This folder is why you migrate with a backup instead of re-downloading cards. ST stores conversations as chats/<character name>/*.jsonl, one file per session. The importer matches each folder to a character imported in the same batch and restores its sessions as archived chat branches on that character. Open the character, and the history you built over months is there to scroll, reference, or continue. Chats belonging to characters that didn't import (or weren't in the zip) are skipped rather than guessed at; a chat attached to the wrong character would be worse than a chat left behind.

worlds/ — the lore

Standalone World Info files become entries in the global worldbook library, available to bind to any character, not just the one they shipped with. Card-embedded character books were already handled in the characters/ pass; this folder is for the worldbooks you maintained as separate files.

OpenAI Settings/ — presets, shelved not armed

Prompt presets import into the preset library as an archive. Deliberately, none of them auto-activate: a preset that silently overrides the phone's defaults on arrival is the kind of surprise that takes an evening to debug. They sit in the library; you enable the one you want.

QuickReplies/ and settings.json — the automation layer

Quick Reply sets attach to each character world imported in the batch, visible at global scope — the QR v2 format desktop ST uses is the format the phone runs. From settings.json exactly one thing is read: extension_settings.regex, your global regex scripts, which continue doing on the phone whatever text surgery they did on the desktop. The rest of the file — UI preferences, theme state, sampler defaults tuned for a desktop screen — stays behind.

What deliberately doesn't move

Themes, backgrounds, and user avatars are desktop furniture; the phone has its own. Group chats have their own JSON import with different semantics, so the backup pass leaves them to it. And secrets.json — the file holding your API keys — is never read at all. Keys re-enter by hand on the phone and live AES-encrypted in the device Keystore; a migration tool that quietly copies credentials is a migration tool you should distrust.

Don't wipe the desktop yet. Verify two things first: open an old character and scroll its archived branch back to the earliest message; then send a line containing one of your regex trigger words and watch the script rewrite it. Both pass, and the zip has done its job — keep it anyway, since your worlds are files, that zip is also your rollback point.