Backup of entire docs or doc folders

I am a very heavy Coda User since 2018. A lot of my work has been transformed by Coda for good.

In order to achieve piece of mind, I would like to save entire, quite long and complex documents. I accept that I’m gonna lose Coda powerful functionalities, but at least I would like to save raw data as it is.

Settings > advanced > export data is not feasible for me since I have a mountain of Coda data.

Some recent packs for exporting tables into csv or google spreadsheets are quite nice, but not what I am looking for

Other low-code solutions such as Notion offer very powerful and flexible exporting options of entire documents.

Although I am more than satisfied with Coda, nowadays I cannot use it at certain projects because of lack of suitable exporting options. Besides, some customers have said to me that, no matter how powerful Coda is, lack of exporting options is a total deal breaker for them. They cannot accept golden cages no matter how much gold has been used for raise them

I am pretty sure that Coda can do it better and offer options to such customers who cannot rennounce to backups

1 Like

Just to add to what @Juan_Luis_Chulilla said, we also use Coda in our company for many different things, and some good reliable automated (that you can schedule) backup option would be good, both as export which is very important but also even as Coda format which can be imported back to Coda (in case that something goes wrong both on Coda or even on our side) so that information can be restored. For example our ERP software is backed up on our local storage every day (+ full online cloud backup that works all the time), but it gives us additional peace of mind for important and sensitive information, because cloud is good and all but it can still go wrong from time to time :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Indeed, and there are no simple ways to export the content in a Coda document. Tables are first-class citizens and accessible by the API, but texts are second class objects unreadable by formulas or the API.

One alternative - set up an email automation to send the documents to an inbox that serves only to process backups.

1 Like

Could you elaborate on how you would send the actual doc please ?

That’s an interesting workaround. Thing is, non-tabular parts of the page are second-class Coda citizens and thus they couldn’t be send as such, or am I wrong?

Correct - you are wrong. :wink: But more accurately, I’m not clear. LOL

While the API has no access to the non-tabular elements, the Email Pack apparently has some internal magic that allows non-tabular content to be transmitted via email messages. This forum thread touches on a lot of these issues. If they would expose this magic to Pack developers, a far better backup capability might be possible. Until then, a hybrid approach could be contrived in something like Google Apps Script that watches a dedicated inbox for content and then uses the Coda API to gather all tabular content, thus blending it all into some sort of unified backup schema stored in Drive, Firestore, sheets, whatever…

Reversing this process - i.e., mitigating disaster recovery - is an entirely different story.

This hackathon sheds some light on the approach. There may be some better (more recent) discussions about exporting document content via emails.

I also have used this approach to support comprehensive CRM processes. So, for example, we are able to send newsletters designed in Coda documents complete with embedded images via email. The Send button dispatches the content via email without breaking a sweat; ergo - moving document content via email is simple stuff. Parsing it at the receiving inbox is also straightforward; storing it with tabular data is also straightforward.

2 Likes