Keeping backups in a folder

1. What the backup folder is

Tabularia keeps your working copy in the browser. A backup folder is a second copy on your own disk. You choose the folder once, and every project you write in this browser keeps its own entry inside it, brought up to date once a day. Clearing the browser's site data, deleting its profile, or reinstalling it leaves the folder where it is.

It is offered in Chrome and Edge on a computer, in a tab or installed as an app. Firefox, Safari, and phones have no way to keep a folder up to date, so there a dated export is still the backup.

2. Choosing the folder

Choose it from whichever place you meet first: the Backup folder card on your Account page, Storage & Usage in any project's Project Settings, or the saving status panel when it suggests one. They all set the same folder.

Press Choose a backup folder… and your computer's own folder dialog opens. Make a new folder, or pick one your computer already copies somewhere else, such as a synced drive. Chrome asks whether Tabularia may edit the files in it; allow that. The project you have open is written straight away. The rest follow soon after, including projects you have not opened in a while, and none of them needs a press of its own.

3. One entry for each project

Each project's entry is named after its title, with a short code after it — The Salt Road (3f9a2c) — so two projects with the same title never land on each other. The name is fixed the first time the project is written. Rename the project later and it goes on writing to the entry you already have.

Your plan decides what the entry holds. With a Cloud subscription it is the whole project, kept unzipped as a project archive folder ending in .tabularia — everything an archive carries, History included. On the Free plan it is the manuscript as a Word document (.docx): the words and their formatting, with the pictures placed among them. Drafts, Sheets, and history stay behind.

Storage & Usage shows the open project's part: the entry's name, whether it holds the whole project or the manuscript only, and when it was last written.

4. How it stays current

Nothing to press, and once a day at most. After half an hour with nothing new saved, Tabularia writes that project's copy for the day. Work straight through without a break that long and it writes as you leave the tab or close the app instead. Anything saved after the day's copy waits for tomorrow's. A day with no changes writes nothing.

Inside a .tabularia folder only what changed is written. The manuscript and the records around it are replaced each time; images are not. Each image is written once, under a name taken from its contents, and passed over every day after that, which is what keeps a book full of pictures quick to back up. Remove an image from the project and it goes from the folder too.

All of this happens in the background, away from the page you type on, and only while the computer is awake. If it slept through the half hour, Tabularia starts the half hour again once it wakes rather than writing the moment you sit back down.

5. Pausing, leaving out, and stopping

The one thing that can stop backups is the browser's permission to write to the folder. An installed app keeps it. A tab keeps it if you chose Allow on every visit when Chrome asked; otherwise Chrome asks again on a later visit. Until you answer, backups are paused, and Resume backups picks up where they stopped. It appears in Storage & Usage, in the saving status panel, and on your Account page.

To keep one project out, choose Don't back up this project in its Storage & Usage; Back up this project puts it back and writes it at once. Choose another folder… moves every project to a new folder and leaves the old one as it was. Stop keeping backups forgets the folder altogether. None of the three deletes anything already written.

6. Bringing a project back

A backup comes back through the ordinary import. For a whole project, point Import folder as new manuscript at that project's .tabularia folder inside your backup folder. A .docx imports like any Word manuscript. See Importing an existing manuscript.

Either way the import makes a new project, and the entry you imported from is left alone. The new project is backed up to the same folder under a name of its own.

7. Backup folder or History snapshots

They guard against different losses. The backup folder survives losing the browser. A History snapshot survives your own edits: it is a dated version you can go back to, where each project's entry only ever holds the latest one.

Neither replaces a dated export. A paragraph you regret deleting is gone from the backup by the next day's copy, and a snapshot lives where your browser does. An export you file away yourself is the copy nothing overwrites.

8. Continue reading

• Previous: Sync, backup, and offline
• Next: Writing and formatting
• All guide articles