Where Your Data Lives

LoginLink keeps its data in three layers. Knowing which is which tells you what to back up, what you can move to MySQL/PostgreSQL, and what to do when something looks wrong.

bootstrap.db        always a small local SQLite file — "where is everything else?"
      │
      ▼
control plane       one database: SQLite (platform.db) or MySQL/PostgreSQL
      │             — the tenant registry, platform admins, platform settings, keys
      ▼
tenant databases    one per organization: SQLite (tenant_<id>.db) or MySQL/PostgreSQL

1. bootstrap.db — always local SQLite

A small file in your data folder (App_Data by default). It is local SQLite necessarily, not by policy: it's what tells a starting instance which database the control plane lives in, and it can't ask a database it hasn't found yet.

It holds:

• which database the control plane uses, and the (encrypted) credentials to connect to it,
• your first-run setup progress,
• the (encrypted) credentials of the auto-provisioning hosting environment, if you configured one, and
• coordination details used when more than one instance shares a database.

2. The control plane

The control plane is one database that holds everything about the platform itself:

• the registry of organizations (tenants) and how to reach each one's database,
• platform administrators and platform-wide settings (including signup security),
• the platform's token-signing keys,
• the key used to encrypt each organization's external-database credentials, and
• the routing index that finds which organization an identifier (such as an email) belongs to.

You choose where it lives during first-run setup:

Choice	Where the data is
SQLite (default)	A file, platform.db, in your data folder.
MySQL or PostgreSQL	A database on a server you run or one LoginLink created for you. Nothing control-plane-related is kept in a local platform.db.

You can also move an SQLite control plane to MySQL/PostgreSQL later from Admin → Platform Settings → Platform Database.

Upgrading an older install

Older versions kept platform settings and keys in a separate host.db. Current versions use a single control-plane database: on the first start after upgrading, the contents of host.db are merged into it and the startup log says so. After that message, host.db is no longer used and can be archived.

3. Tenant databases

Every organization has its own database, so one organization's data is never in another's:

• SQLite (default) — a file per organization, tenant_<id>.db, in your data folder.
• MySQL or PostgreSQL — chosen by the organization when it signs up or later from Console → Database & Migration. Either a server the organization operates, or one created automatically through Database Auto-Provisioning. See BYO-DB / Data Residency.

What to back up

Your setup	Back up
Everything on SQLite (the default)	The whole App_Data folder, as one unit.
Control plane on MySQL/PostgreSQL	bootstrap.db from your data folder and the control-plane database.
Any organization on MySQL/PostgreSQL	That organization's database, on whatever schedule you back up any production database. LoginLink stores only the connection for it, not the data.

If you lose bootstrap.db while the control plane is on MySQL/PostgreSQL, the control-plane database itself is intact. You can run first-run setup again and choose Connect an existing database to reattach — but keep a backup so you never need to.

See Backing Up & Moving Your Deployment for the step-by-step.