Technologies are generally described for systems and methods effective to provide a seamless backup and recovery of applications using metadata. In an example, metadata can be defined to map data associated with an application and provide the relationship of the data to the application. From the metadata, a backup system can create a capsule containing application data, and a payload containing application related data. The capsule can contain not just the application data, but also configuration information, and access parameters. The capsule and payload can be associated together and saved by the backup system. In another example, to recover an application, a capsule and a payload can be retrieved, and using the metadata, the capsule can be unpacked to reinstall the application to the same state it was in when backed up, and the application related data can be restored from the payload.