Everything else you need to keep
A backup is the database. Everything else sits in folders, and four of them are yours — the rest belongs to Kustos and it can rebuild all of it.
That is worth stating plainly because the Kustos-owned folders are the ones that look alarming: %ProgramData%\Kustos\assets is nearly 4 GB, nothing in the app sends you there, and it is easy to assume something that large must matter. Measured, almost none of it does.
Sizes from a large install, so you can see that size is a poor guide:
| Folder | Size | What is in it | If it is missing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your assets folder (example: C:\Users\you\Helm) | ~19 GB | The artwork tree — Movies, TV Shows, Logos, Templates, Missing, and your network logos | Kustos holds records of artwork that is not on disk |
| Your font folders (example: C:\Users\you\Fonts) | ~602 MB | Every font your templates name | Posters render in the wrong typeface |
| Kustos Asset Backups (beside your assets folder, not inside it) | ~800 MB | Every artwork file Kustos moves on your behalf, in dated run folders -- resets, cleared slots, merged title folders, stray-year tidying, and a file of your own it was about to overwrite | You lose the only copy of anything you dropped in by hand and then replaced. And it prunes itself after 7 days by default |
| %ProgramData%\Kustos\assets\titlecards | ~3.7 GB | Generated — the title cards Kustos drew | Kustos draws them again. Expensive in time, nothing lost |
| %ProgramData%\Kustos\assets\fonts | ~2 MB | The upload target for fonts added through Kustos | Nothing, unless you uploaded a font you have no other copy of |
| %ProgramData%\Kustos\assets\tcm | ~2 MB | A cache of TitleCardMaker fonts, fetched from GitHub on first use | Re-fetched automatically |
| %ProgramData%\Kustos\fonts | ~39 MB | Fonts that come with Kustos | Replaced by reinstalling |
| %ProgramData%\Kustos\overlay-base | The clean poster from before Kustos added overlays, one file per title (titles whose clean poster is already in your assets folder are not copied here) | Kustos has no other copy. The database does not hold these. Without the folder, the original under an overlaid poster is gone |
Only the first three, and overlay-base, are yours. Everything else under %ProgramData%\Kustos is generated, cached, or shipped — Kustos can rebuild it, and a reinstall replaces the rest. The folder is large, and that is the only reason it looks important. Kustos Asset Backups is not only an undo history any more. It is where a file of yours goes when something was about to overwrite it in place — so it can hold the last copy of a poster you dropped in by hand. It also prunes itself: the default is 7 days (Settings → Setup → Media management, "Keep what Kustos moves for N days", or Keep forever to stop pruning). If you have ever relied on it to get something back, set that to forever, or copy what you care about out before the week is up. Your credentials are already in the backup. Service API keys, notification channels and every setting live in the database, so a snapshot has them. Nothing Kustos needs is kept outside it. So the whole of "keep this safe" is: a backup, your assets folder, your font folders, and overlay-base. The question to ask of anything else is not how big it is, but whether Kustos can make it again.
Where yours are. These are settings, not fixed paths, so read them off your own install rather than copying the examples above:
- Assets folder — Settings → Automation → Artwork
- Font folders — Settings → Setup → General, the font folders card
- Kustos Asset Backups — not a setting you type: it is created beside your assets folder and follows that folder if you move it. If your assets live at C:\Users\you\Helm, this is C:\Users\you\Kustos Asset Backups.
The two that change how artwork looks are your assets folder and your font folders. The database records what is in those folders; it does not contain it. Restore the database without them and Kustos believes it has already dressed titles whose files are gone, and draws anything new in a substitute typeface.