Backup & restore

A .pond archive is a compact, restorable snapshot: clean index-free Lance datasets plus a manifest, embeddings preserved.

pond copy --from @ --to backup/2026-06-16.pond     # snapshot the configured store
pond copy --from backup/2026-06-16.pond --to @     # restore into the configured store

@ is the configured store; local is the local default dir. Restore is an idempotent merge - existing rows are deduped, never duplicated.