Backup and restore
One button writes a JSON file containing your reminders and your settings. It is plain text you can open and read, and restoring it puts everything back exactly as it was.
Making one
Settings → Your Data → export. A .json file downloads. That is the whole
procedure; there is nothing to configure and no account it is tied to.
Worth doing before anything drastic: clearing all data, moving machines, or a browser reinstall. Also worth doing occasionally for the ordinary reason — the reminders live in a browser profile, and browser profiles do occasionally get lost.
What is in the file
- Every reminder, pending and recently fired — title, address, time, note, tag, folder, repeat, priority, and whether it was completed
- Your settings: quiet hours, defaults, snooze choices, badge mode, notification wording
- Your tags, folders, templates, saved views and per-site rules
- Custom themes, if you made any
Not included: page thumbnails and uploaded sounds. Both are large binary blobs that would make the file enormous and neither can be recreated from anything else, so they stay on the machine that made them.
The file is readable JSON rather than an opaque archive on purpose. You should be able to open your own data in a text editor and see that it is what you thought it was — that is a large part of what "no lock-in" means in practice.
Restoring
Settings → Your Data → import, and pick the file. Reminders that were pending when the backup was made are scheduled again; ones that had already fired come back as history rather than being re-armed to fire a second time.
Every field is checked on the way in. A hand-edited file with a field Latr does not recognise loses that field rather than breaking the import, and a field with a nonsense value falls back to a sensible one instead of producing a reminder that cannot fire.
Moving to a new machine
Two routes, and which is right depends on what you want:
- Sync if both machines use the same browser profile and you want them to stay in step from now on.
- Backup and restore for a one-off move, a different browser, or if you would rather your reminders never travelled through your browser vendor at all.
A backup carries more than sync does — thumbnails aside, it includes things sync deliberately leaves out because of item-size limits.
Backup or CSV?
They are different tools and doing both jobs with one format would do both badly.
| For | |
|---|---|
| JSON backup | Putting everything back exactly as it was. Complete, and it round-trips. |
| CSV export | Reading, sorting and pivoting your reminders in a spreadsheet. Cannot be imported back. |
Something unclear, or something Latr does that this page does not cover? Tell us — the page is easier to fix than the confusion it causes.