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Plan rollback before you need it. The middle of an incident is not the time to figure out which command reverts which database, or whether your snapshots are recent enough.

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When to roll back

Roll back when:
  • /health returns non-ok and you can’t fix it within minutes.
  • Error rate or latency is sharply worse than baseline and not improving.
  • A regression eval that passed pre-upgrade is now failing.
  • Customer reports confirm the new version is broken.
Don’t roll back for:
  • One outlier metric that hasn’t actually impacted users.
  • Behavior changes that were expected per the changelog.
  • Issues that are clearly local to one bad request rather than the service as a whole.
If you’re unsure, roll back. The cost of an unnecessary rollback is low; the cost of leaving a bad version live is high.

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What rollback looks like

Rollback has two layers:
  1. Image rollback — switch the Engine container back to the previous image tag.
  2. Data rollback — restore the brain database to a pre-upgrade snapshot, if migrations made the new version’s schema incompatible with the old.
Most rollbacks need only #1. Some need #2.

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Image rollback

If the new version’s migrations didn’t change the brain schema in a way the old version doesn’t understand: 
# 1. update docker-compose.yml back to the previous image tag
# from: image: engine:2.4.0
# to:   image: engine:2.3.1

# 2. pull the previous image (it should still be in the registry)
docker compose pull engine

# 3. drain and restart
docker compose stop --timeout 30 engine
docker compose up -d engine

# 4. verify
curl -fsS "$ENGINE_URL/health" | jq
If the previous version’s image was deleted from the registry, you may need to rebuild from the previous git tag. Plan for this — keep at least the last 5 versions of each image.

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Brain rollback

When a forward-only migration shipped in the new version (most migrations), the old Engine version can’t read the upgraded brain. You have to restore the brain to the pre-upgrade state.

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Restoring from snapshot

# 1. stop the engine
docker compose stop engine

# 2. restore from your pre-upgrade snapshot
# (assuming you made one before the upgrade — see Upgrade)
docker compose run --rm --entrypoint /bin/sh engine -c \
  'sqlite3 /data/brain.sqlite ".restore /data/brain-pre-upgrade.db"'

# 3. start the old version
docker compose up -d engine

# 4. verify
curl -fsS "$ENGINE_URL/health" | jq
You will lose any data written between the snapshot and the rollback — typically minutes to an hour, depending on how long the bad version was live.

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What gets lost

Specifically:
  • Any episodes, knowledge, or social-graph entries written during the bad window.
  • Any conversation history from the bad window.
  • Any feedback submitted during the bad window.
Depending on your application, you may need to inform affected users or replay important events.

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What’s preserved

  • The pre-upgrade brain state, exactly.
  • All long-term memory from before the upgrade.
  • All migrations applied before the upgrade.

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Volume snapshot rollback

If your infrastructure provides volume snapshots (EBS, GCP persistent disks, etc.): 
# 1. stop the engine
docker compose stop engine

# 2. detach the engine_data volume

# 3. attach a snapshot from before the upgrade

# 4. start the old engine version
docker compose up -d engine
Volume snapshots are usually faster to restore than file-level restores for large brains. Test the restore path before you need it.

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Drain before stopping

The Engine has graceful-shutdown logic. Stopping with a drain timeout lets in-flight turns complete: 
docker compose stop --timeout 60 engine
60 seconds is usually enough; longer turns get cut off but the brain state is consistent because the agent loop persists at boundaries (after every model call, every tool result).

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Communicating

While rolling back:
  • Post in the incident channel: “Rolling back to v2.3.1 due to $symptom.”
  • Update the status page if customer impact was real.
  • After rollback completes: confirm /health ok, errors recovered, post the all-clear.

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Post-rollback

Once the rollback is in and stable:
  1. Capture the diagnostic. Logs, traces, metrics from the bad window. You’ll need them to fix forward.
  2. Don’t redeploy in panic. Whatever broke needs root cause first.
  3. File a postmortem ticket. See Postmortems.
  4. Add a regression eval. The exact failure mode should be a permanent test case. See Regression.

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When rollback isn’t possible

Some failure modes can’t be cleanly rolled back:
  • The brain is corrupted and snapshots are unusable. You’re now in a data-recovery scenario; involve whoever owns the brain.
  • Migrations dropped data that the old version expects. Same scenario.
  • The new version sent destructive MCP calls (deleted external resources, sent emails). The Engine’s state is recoverable; the external state isn’t.
For these, the rollback is partial — restore what you can, accept the loss for what you can’t, and design future migrations to be reversible.

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Practice rollback

Run a rollback drill in staging quarterly. The exercise:
  1. Bring staging up on the current production version.
  2. Take a snapshot.
  3. Upgrade staging to a deliberately-broken version (e.g. an internal build with a known bug).
  4. Roll back using the procedure above.
  5. Time how long it took. Identify what slowed you down.
A rollback you’ve never practiced is a rollback that won’t go to plan.

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See also

  • Upgrade — how to do the upgrade so rollback isn’t needed.
  • Postmortems — what comes after.
  • Database — backup and restore details.