Back Up and Restore Your Data

A backup is a single JSON file. It holds your batches and your recipes and nothing else: not the knowledge base, which the app fetches anyway, and nothing about the device it came from. It's a snapshot, so it holds what was there when you tapped the button rather than tracking the app afterwards.

Nothing is uploaded. There's no account and no server behind BrewDocs, so the file is handed to you and then it's yours. Where it ends up is your decision, and the app never learns which you picked. The other half of that is worth saying plainly: nobody can get a backup back for you, because no copy exists anywhere else.

You can make one before you've brewed anything. The action is always available, and on an empty app it produces a backup with nothing in it rather than refusing.

The Backup screen opens with Back up now. Tapping it builds the file there and then, out of what's stored at that moment.

What happens next depends on the device. Where the browser offers a native share sheet, which is most phones, the file goes to it and you pick the destination: a cloud drive, a file manager, or anything else the device lists as a share target. BrewDocs doesn't choose for you, deliberately, because the whole point of the file is that you decide where it lives.

Where there's no share sheet, which is most desktop browsers, the file downloads instead. It arrives as backup.json in whatever folder your browser downloads to.

Starting a share and then dismissing it cancels the backup, and nothing downloads as a consolation prize. Tap Back up now again if you changed your mind.

Every file is called backup.json, so keeping several means renaming them or letting the destination do it for you. The export date is recorded inside the file, but the name won't tell you which of two is newer.

Under the button is a file picker labelled Restore from a backup file. Choose a backup and the app reads it immediately. There's no confirmation step, so pick the file with that in mind.

A restore replaces rather than merges. The batches and recipes in the file become the batches and recipes on this device, and anything you had that the file doesn't contain is gone. That's what makes it the right tool on a new phone, and what makes it worth a moment's thought on a phone you've been brewing on.

Replacing works per kind. A file holding only recipes rewrites your recipes and leaves your batches exactly as they were, and a batches-only file does the reverse. It works that way on purpose: a backup file doubles as a way to hand a recipe to another brewer, and receiving one shouldn't wipe out their brew history.

A file that isn't a backup is refused before anything is written, and says so on the screen. Nothing on the device changes, so a wrong pick costs you nothing but the tap.

A file that reads fine but holds a record this version of the app can't yet make sense of is a smaller problem. The rest of the file restores, and the record that couldn't be brought forward is listed on the app's Updates page (/migrations/failed), where you can retry or discard it. That page has no menu entry yet, so reaching it means typing the address.