Backing up and restoring your reminders

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, tags, folder, repeat, priority, highlights, and whether it was completed
• Every page kept in the library, with the same fields

Not included: your settings, the names and colours of your folders and tags, templates, saved views, per-site rules, themes, saved windows, page thumbnails and uploaded sounds. Restored on a new machine, a page keeps its built-in tags; folders and tags you made yourself need making again there. To carry a saved window across, share it as a link and open it on the other machine.

Latr also keeps automatic backups on this machine - one before every update, and any you take by hand under Settings → Your Data → Automatic backups. Those also hold a copy of your settings, and restore the same way.

You can seal the file with a passphrase instead: the encrypted backup is the same content, encrypted on your device so it can sit in a cloud folder or an inbox. Nobody can open it without the passphrase, and a forgotten one cannot be recovered.

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 works between different browsers and has no size limit, where sync stays within one browser's own account and its storage quota of about 100KB.

Backup or CSV?

They are different tools and doing both jobs with one format would do both badly.