Do I need Hermes installed on the new machine first? No. Talaria places the state; Hermes adopts it when installed (before or after — both orders work). Talaria prints the official install command but never runs installers itself.
Checklist or vault — which should I pick? Checklist, unless you have a reason. Keys stay out of the file entirely; pasting a handful of values takes two minutes and every one gets a dashboard link. Pick the vault when the transfer path itself is untrusted (mailing a drive, cloud relay) or you have dozens of keys. Both are first-class.
Is my conversation history in the bundle?
Yes, by default — it's most of what makes your agent yours. It's labeled private
content throughout; treat the bundle like a private notebook, or use
--vault --lock-everything to encrypt it too, or --exclude the conversations
family (it stays safe on the old machine either way — capture never deletes).
Why won't my WhatsApp session move? It's registered to the old machine (a device slot on your account). Copying it makes the two machines fight and can unlink the account. Re-pairing on the new machine takes about a minute and always works — the finish checklist has the exact command.
Can both machines run my agent afterwards?
Pack with --intent clone and read the hazard list: platform bots (Telegram etc.)
will answer from BOTH machines; device-linked chats pair with only one. Default intent
is replace — old gateway off once the new one starts.
Old machine is Linux, new one is Windows (or the reverse) — really supported?
Yes. Layouts translate (~/.hermes ↔ %LOCALAPPDATA%\hermes), path fields inside
configs and jobs are rewritten structurally (never by regex over file bytes),
Windows-illegal filenames are caught at pack time with verdicts, shell-script cron
jobs are flagged as impossible-on-Windows with the reason, and stock-skill provenance
hashes are rebaselined so hermes skills list-modified keeps telling the truth.
What happens to my named profiles?
They travel whole — each profile's skills, cron jobs, config, and env are their own
sub-universe, restored under profiles/<name>/ with the same rules as the root.
How big will the bundle be? Roughly your conversations + memories + skills; caches, logs, code, and node/venv trees never travel (they're re-provisioned). The wizard shows the estimate before packing and checks destination free space and FAT32 limits up front.
Can I open a bundle without applying it?
talaria inspect <bundle> — provenance card, --list, --cat member, --extract,
--deps --target-os windows, --checklist, --verify, and --salvage for damaged
files. All read-only.
What if the apply goes wrong halfway?
That's the tested path: automatic rollback restores the pre-apply state (verified by
re-hashing), and talaria rollback stays available afterwards too. The safety copy is
never deleted by a failure.
Does it work on Termux? Yes, with one honest caveat the tool tells you: Android has no service manager, so scheduled jobs only run while a foreground gateway is alive.
I already made backups with hermes backup — useful?
Yes: Talaria recognizes those zips and points you at upstream's own hermes import,
which is the right tool for them. Talaria bundles carry the extra intelligence
(provenance, verdicts, rewrites, rollback).
Something in the bundle I didn't recognize?
Unrecognized files are content-scanned at pack time (secret patterns quarantine to
credential handling; big/binary unknowns are recorded, not carried) and applying them
is a disclosed consent. talaria why <path> explains any file.
Where are the reports?
$HERMES_HOME/migration/talaria/<timestamp>/ on the machine that ran the operation,
plus <bundle>.checklist.html beside the bundle at pack time. Single-file HTML,
redacted by default, print-to-PDF friendly.