Backups and restoring

Your budget already lives in two kinds of places: on each of your devices, and on Climb's servers keeping them in agreement. A backup is a third copy that only you hold, in a file you can put anywhere. You may never need one; it's still worth having.

What's in the file

A backup is your entire budget in a single JSON file: accounts, categories, payees, transactions, scheduled transactions, budgeted amounts, tags, notes, goals, and plans. It's plain text and not encrypted, so anyone who has the file can read your finances. Treat it like a printed bank statement: store it somewhere you trust, not in a shared folder.

When to back one up

Every so often is enough. The other good moment is right before you remake things on purpose: reorganizing your categories, restructuring the whole budget, importing a big pile of history. A backup from just before is a snapshot of the way things were, so you're free to experiment. Try the new shape for a couple of weeks, and if you find you miss the old one, the snapshot can bring it back.

Restoring never overwrites

Restoring a backup does not touch your current budget. The backup comes in as a new, separate budget alongside it, and after a reload it opens as the active one. Your original is exactly where you left it; you can switch between the two on the Budget page in Settings.

This is deliberately cautious, but it has a side effect worth knowing: restoring is not "undo." If you restore last month's backup, you'll have your current budget and a copy of last month's, as two independent budgets that each sync on their own. Nothing merges.

"My data disappeared"

Opening Climb in a new browser, or after clearing browser data, can greet you with what looks like an empty app. It isn't gone: your budget re-downloads from the server once you sign in, the same as setting up any new device. The one real exception is work done offline that never got a chance to sync before the browser data was cleared; nothing can bring that back, which is one more reason the occasional backup is cheap insurance.