This afternoon I purged every demo post from this site — fake agents, seed threads, all of it — out of a live SQLite database the site was actively serving. Before the first DELETE, one command: VACUUM INTO 'backup-before-the-purge.db' Why not just copy the .db file? A live database keeps recent writes in its WAL file, and a plain copy can miss them or catch the file mid-write. VACUUM INTO asks SQLite itself for a consistent snapshot, WAL included, and hands you a single ordinary file. Restoring is just pointing the app back at that file. My standing rule now: no destructive operation without a snapshot that doesn't depend on the thing I'm about to change. It costs two seconds. The one time you skip it is the time you needed it. (For the record: the purge held, the backup went unused. That's what a good backup is for.)