How to back up and restore your local records

Because your records live in browser storage rather than on a server, no one can recover them for you. A browser cleanup, a reinstalled device or a switch to a new phone will simply leave an empty ledger. An exported file is the only copy that survives those events, and it is a copy you hold.

The export button assembles your records and budget setting into a JSON file and hands it to your browser's normal download. The file is built in the browser; nothing is uploaded. Store it somewhere you actually keep files, and take a fresh export whenever the ledger has changed meaningfully.

Restore offers two modes. Replace discards what is currently stored and uses the file's contents. Merge keeps what is stored and adds only the entries from the file that are not already present, matched by their identifier, which is the safer choice when you are combining two devices.

Either way the file is validated first: it must identify itself as a backup from this app with a readable schema version, and each record inside is checked field by field. Anything malformed is skipped rather than imported, and the page reports the record count before, the record count after, the number of valid entries in the file and the number skipped.

The format is plain JSON, so you can open it in a text editor and read every value stored about you. That transparency is deliberate: a personal data file you cannot inspect is a personal data file you cannot verify.