Resetting your instance

Wipe everything and start fresh. Last-resort option — destructive.

What this is

The nuclear option. Reset wipes everything on your instance and re-bootstraps a fresh OpenClaw setup, like the day you signed up:

  • Configuration — gone
  • Sessions and conversation history — gone
  • Memory — gone
  • Skills — gone
  • Channel connections — gone
  • Provider keys — gone

After a reset, you start over: connect a provider, connect a channel, pick up your agent's personality from scratch.

Resetting is a Beach operation — you do it from your instance page in Beach, not from the OpenClaw Control UI.

Warning: this is destructive and irreversible

Once you confirm the reset, there's no undo. The only way to get your old setup back is to restore from a backup — which only works if you have one from before the reset.

Take a manual backup before resetting if there's any chance you might want to come back. Even a slim chance. Backups are cheap; regret is not.

See Backups for how, and Restoring from a backup for what restore looks like.

When you'd do it

Reset is a last resort. Reach for it when:

  • Something is broken in a way you can't troubleshoot.
  • Your agent's behavior is wrong and you can't figure out which config or skill is causing it.
  • You just want to start completely over with a clean slate.

If your instance won't even start, that's a different problem — see My instance won't start before resetting.

Steps

  1. (Strongly recommended) Take a manual backup first. See Backups.
  2. Open your instance page in Beach.
  3. Click the reset action.
  4. Read the confirmation prompt carefully. It will warn you again that this wipes everything.
  5. Confirm.
  6. Wait a few minutes. Beach tears down your current setup and provisions a fresh OpenClaw instance.
  7. Once it's online, you'll need to reconnect a provider and any channels you want, just like first-time setup.

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