---
title: "Exporting an application from Cloud Platform"
date: "2024-02-14T06:18:38+00:00"
summary: "Learn how to export your entire Cloud Platform application, including code, themes, database, and files. Discover step-by-step instructions for creating a portable site archive using Drush."
image:
type: "page"
url: "/acquia-cloud-platform/exporting-application-cloud-platform"
id: "edd3cfe0-b0b6-4934-b5ba-501ab09c3f6b"
---

Cloud Platform is an open software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that doesn’t lock in your application. You can export the whole application—code, themes, database, and files—at any time to a site archive file, which you can then use to host your application locally, or use another hosting service.

Important

Acquia doesn’t recommend using the [Backup and Migrate](https://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate) module with Cloud Platform. [Learn more](/acquia-cloud-platform/develop-apps/drupal-apps/module-incompatibilities).

Exporting an application using Drush
------------------------------------

Note

The following instructions are incompatible with Drush 9.

You can also use the [Drush](http://www.drush.org/) command line tool to create a portable site archive file, which you can then install on a different hosting platform if you want. The site archive file created during the export process includes your databases, themes, content, modules, website, and module configuration settings, and users. To create a site archive file:

1.  [Connect to your infrastructure with SSH](/acquia-cloud-platform/manage-apps/command-line).
2.  Run a command similar to the following:
    
        drush @site.env archive-dump --destination=mysite.tar.gz
    
    where `[site]` is the name of your application on Cloud Platform, `[env]` is the Cloud Platform environment (one of `prod`, `test`, or `dev`), and the `--destination` argument is the location where you want the site archive file created.
    

You can then use `scp` or another similar tool to download the site archive file.