I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to back up my Coda docs, but I haven’t had much luck finding a clear solution. I’m a bit of a worrier when it comes to losing important data, so I want to make sure my Coda docs are safely backed up somewhere besides Coda — just in case something unexpected happens.
I’d love to hear from anyone who has set up a backup system for their Coda docs. Specifically, I’m curious about:
What’s your backup process?
Where do you store the backups (e.g., cloud storage, local drives, external services)?
Are there any tools or automation methods you’ve found helpful?
Have you had to restore backups before, and if so, how smoothly did it go?
Any tips, best practices, or lessons learned would be super helpful! Thanks so much in advance — I really appreciate any advice you can share.
There is unfortunately no straightforward way to back up a Coda doc outside of Coda.
For background on the need to back up, you can read @Bill_French 's comments on “file over app”.
The “problem” with Coda is the extremely tight integration of data with function.
I am not aware of a method or tool you can use to export and reuse functionality, especially in more complex docs.
When it comes to data, it will depend on what the doc looks like. Is it a wiki/hub type doc? Is it an app, to do say stock keeping? Do you do project management?
I like to use canvas columns over pages, so in a wiki/ hub type environment, you could simply download the table to Excel. In a stock keeping app, you would need to decide whether you need an audit trail of the movements, or whether say a monthly backup of stock level is ok. Again, you can export to excel.
As you can see, how you would back up your data is going to be very specific to the east you use Coda.
TBH - same as with Gmail, Google Drive, Google photos, I do not back up my Coda docs outside of Coda. What I will do is make a copy into Coda when I want to make a major change to a Coda doc.
@Macey_Cherry you can also leverage Coda APIs to build a script that regularly backs up important data.
This script will be ideal for backing up some important tables, I have personally faced issues while handling Canvas (Rich Text) through API. so make sure that the script is exporting things in the desired format.
I might just resort to doing a back up of Coda into Coda and lock the docs. Thank you for this advice.