Ok, thanks to let me know!
Is there any way to do the backups from iPad? Having something like OmniFocus’s Archive mode, but for backup would be really nice here.
Guess, it’s another good candidate for paid plan option - the more and more I stick with your app, the more and more data I have, the more I begin to worry not to loose it and keep incremental backup / little Time Machine.
Hm? =)
In terms of iPad, backing up to iCloud with Apple’s own system will include the Agenda data, so worth doing.
If you are paranoid about it, you could use a tool like iExplorer to get the Agenda data off the device as a backup.
We will consider if backups could be an option, but it would add a lot to the data on your device. Perhaps an archive export of all the data would be the best option, which you could then move somewhere else.
The case I’m frightened: something goes wrong - on your side or on iCloud side and the database get corrupted. Meaning all my notes (and I’ve got quite a lot of things to process in there already) will get lost.
Notion.so has an option to setup GitHub sync. I’m looking for something to enable versioning / backups running for me - as it’s all is very important to me, I would like to be sure that even if (when) something goes wrong one day (it always does one day, from my experience), I could recover.
And I believe it would be fair if you ask extra for that.
I’m not sure I understood how backuping up to iCloud with Apple’s own system works, but I definitely don’t want to plug a PC / Mac on a regular basis just to make sure my beautiful and portable notebook is safe - hope you will understand that 
I mean - it must not be on my device… could be an Automator (as Agenda is iOS / MacOS only) ready to use workflow, that will let to upload it on some personal S3, or… I don’t know - some other cloud storage…
What do you think?
It’s an interesting idea, but it is not something we can build in a short space of time, I’m afraid. Setting up that cloud infrastructure etc is a lot of work.
My advice would be to use the backup solutions Apple provides. It is good not only for Agenda, but other apps. Back up iPad - Apple Support
The iCloud one is the easiest. Just ensure you have an iCloud account that has enough space, and then turn on the backup option in Settings on the iPad. It will backup Agenda’s data. If you ever encounter an issue, restore the iPad to a recent backup. Gives some piece of mind.
We will consider if we can make a library export option. That would export a large zip file into the Files app. You could put that in Dropbox or into iCloud, and make manual backups that way. I guess possibly we could make a regular backup in the same way. Will think about it.
Thank you for your offer, but I don’t like the idea, not at all - iPad goes to de-wire-ization, and you offer quite the opposite; or what you offer won’t keep previous databases.
I’m not saying it has to be a separate cloud (and you will loose the key advantage of keeping my data with me only). I’m saying that I need some option to keep multiple previous versions of the data, or I can’t trust the app to keep everything I have to write down.
Manual backups also never works good - that’s how people loose data (because they never make backups manually).
I understand you have a different tech. skills and profile inside the team, which basically let you to create such a wonderful app in a first hand.
I’m more from an SRE/DevOps/System Engineering world and I used to think different here (seen a lot of the f…ups from both users and cloud providers, even as big as Apple).
You seems like missed the Automator part, don’t you? It could solve a lot of issues, give flexibility and extensibility, without making you to program and support it all?
Automator doesn’t exist on iOS at all. I guess you could mean Shortcuts.
The main point is that Apple provides system wide backup, so that each app doesn’t have to.
I could imagine we could offer export of all data as a zip file, and perhaps also allow that as a shortcut. (On Mac, it is much more straightforward to simply zip or copy the data with a script, because you have access to the file system.)
We will consider it. Thanks for the feedback!
Shortcuts it is indeed, thank you for the correction!
Apple doesn’t provide incremental backup for iCloud data, unfortunately. You can get it with Time Machine for Mac apps, but nothing I’m aware of for iOS & iCloud apps.
Shortcut button / step - export all notes (in any format) would put my mind in piece here and it feels like an easy thing to do as well - please, correct me if I’m wrong.
It would be possible to export all the data to Documents or something like that.
How do you mean iCloud does not do incremental backup? As far as I know, that is exactly what it does. It incrementally backs up your iPhone, at least once a day.
It doesn’t provide a history though, so maybe that is what you are getting at.
Anyway, we will consider it. I’ve put it on the list for when we can find a bit of time.
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Well, in case if Agenda database get corrupted or deleted, I wouldn’t like to loose all my day data and quite a few hours to get recovered from the night backup (if I will be quick enough to notice that in 1 day, and not in 1 week, for example, being on holiday).
Please, give me the way to export and manage the export on my own way, to keep my data save.
I mean - we are all human and things could happen, hate to have it with my database containing all my records and notes and everything else.
We will try to add this, but it is not something we hear very often from customers. Most people are completely happy with the iCloud backup Apple provides. It is likely that the iCloud backup will be more up-to-date than a manual backup you have to run yourself. And the Apple backup will include all apps, not just Agenda.
I understand it’s my experience, that makes me think about what could go wrong, but things does go wrong quite often.
Apple’s backup is no good - here is why in more details:
- 1 July you updated the app, and during the update the database get corrupted (iCloud minor bug on top of your migration script, that you just introduced because of some nice feature to add)
- 1 July your customer have a vacation, so he don’t open Agenda at all
- 15 of July he opened Agenda to find that all his records are gone.
What will he do? There are no backups in iCloud lasting that long - it’s only available for the last few days, maximum.
Another case:
- at the end of the 2 July customer opened the app and found no data - panicked;
- he had a very intensive day, with lots of WhatsApp communication, including a very important document with competitor’s production details he got there; he also run his first marathon, so he’s proud to see this all tracked in his Health app;
- following someone’s recommendation, he recover from last iCloud backup - ok, Agenda data is there, but all WhatsApp messages (including important document) and his marathon record are gone from his phone, as well as many other data, that has no single server sync (like Telegram or Notion, for example) and solely rely on local data storage.
I understand, this might not happen often, but when it does, it’s quite dramatic, like any incident.
Since, you are moving to become one-fit-all app (like Notion does), ensuring data is safe is getting more and more important as well.
I’m only aware about nightly backups that are stored somewhere (could be the same iCloud folder, by the way: every new day the app starts, it does snapshot and backup of the previous data to the folder available to the user in iCloud drive, for example), but there could be some other ways to do that - probably even easier than that.
And, as I mentioned, that seems like a very valid paid option - if you are crazy about your data (like I do), here is a paid option for that.
Hope it makes sense now?
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Thanks, and yes, there are certainly some cases where iCloud is not idea. If you have a Mac, Time Machine is a good option, because it does give you some granularity in how far back you go in the history etc.
We will keep it in mind, and see if we can come up with something on iOS. Appreciate the feedback.
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Thank you! If anything I could be of assistance, please, let me know!
I’d like to add my voice to @alexander.potemkin here — I’d love to see a more robust backup option than basic iCloud. Two reasons:
One, I don’t see why I should trust Apple to not lose my data. I’ve used Apple products and services long enough to remember MobileMe/iTools and its instability. A backup stored in only one place is, while better than nothing, not something to count on. I understand that “most people are completely happy” with Apple’s promises, but that will change next time that iCloud has a catastrophic data loss or security breach.
Two, I find it valuable to go back in time and review how my notes have changed. This means something similar to git history would be invaluable to me.
A simple implementation that I would be satisfied with is some way to (1) do a full library export, and (2) automate doing the full export. Full library export comes up occasionally, see this question for example: Back up Info
It seems to me that a full-library Markdown export should be a simple feature to add: you already support per-project export, and a full export should be a matter of iterating across all projects and writing them to a target directory. Add a menu item, and done.
Export automation is trickier, but I’d be happy with a first version that just adds an AppleScript call that does a full-library MD export, and allows specifying a target directory. (From there, I can export to a local git repository and add the necessary scripting to do this hourly and push to a remote git repository I control.)
Overall, that seems like a great premium feature to add for data-safety conscious users with a technical bent. (I get that people like that are likely a small minority.) And I know how pretentious and pointy-haired manager that sounds, but it just doesn’t seem like it should be a ton of work to add this to the (excellent!) app you have here.
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Do you want this on the Mac, or on iOS? On the Mac, it is pretty trivial to make manual backups. If you can write a little script (Applescript, Python, Bash shell), you just copy the folder containing Agendas data to some other location (eg local or Dropbox folder).
A script to do this is as simple as this:
cp -rf ~/Library/Group\ Containers/WRBK2Z2EG7.group.com.momenta.agenda.macos ~/Desktop
This one just backs up to the Desktop, but you can change that last path to whatever you like. You could set this up with launchd, or as an automator action. You can even run scripts like this from AppleScript, I believe. In fact, it may even be possible to make an automator action directly that does a folder copy, and then you don’t need any scripting at all.
On iOS, it is more tricky. I should point out that it is not true that you only have a single backup on iOS. If you are using iCloud or Dropbox sync, effectively you have two backups. You have the sync data, which will restore to new devices, and you have Apple’s standard iCloud backup of the device. For most people, this should be enough. If you also sync with a Mac, and have Time Machine on there, you have yet another backup running.
I think exporting the library would be a good feature, and we will certainly consider it. Perhaps not as Markdown initially, since that is a lossy backup, but probably as a zip file containing the folder I copy in the script above.
Drew
Thank you for your comments!
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It’s great that the WRBK2Z2EG7 directory is a full backup. I’ll add it to my backup system.
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I bring up (automated) Markdown export because I’d love to be able to diff revisions of my notes. The on-disk backup consists of a bunch of SQLite databases — not very amenable to
git diffto find out what changes I made last week. I realize it’s a lossy export, and I’m fine with that for my purposes. An AppleScript hook to ask Agenda.app to perform the export will allow a scripted export so git revisions could be written automatically. -
So far, I’m mainly referring to the Mac situation. I understand iOS restrictions complicate matters. A Markdown export of the entire library would be a great start. A timer-based automatic export would be fabulous — with timestamped exports, it’d be even better. I’m sure iOS has massive restrictions on running timers, but if the timer just runs while the app is active, that’s probably good enough. WhatsApp does something similar with its conversation backup (though I don’t think it writes anything outside its sandbox).
Note that we already do support quite a bit of automation via x-callback. Perhaps you can even write an AppleScript that simply exports notes one at a time. Not 100% about whether that would be possible.
I looked through the x-callback reference page, but didn’t find anything like list-projects or list-notes. There are ways to grab objects by ID, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to retrieve a list of IDs to work with.
Indeed the read-side of the the x-callback-urls is something we’d still like to add.