Backups in Outline
Never worry about losing your notes again!
To make sure all your notes are safe, we strongly recommend enabling our Backup Feature.
Backups are needed to restore damaged or accidentally deleted files. If you want to open a notebook that was simply closed, there is no need to restore it from Backups.
MAC
In Outline on your Mac, go to Outline > Settings > Backup and enable backups.
At the first installation, Backups are enabled by default. Their destination folder is iCloud Drive folder on your Mac. In case no cloud located backups are needed, disable the backups or change the destination folder to local one.
- In Destination you can choose any folder on your Mac to store Outline backup files inside. It also can be the mounted folder of any cloud storage or WebDAV server.
- Set the Frequency for the backups to be generated (from 1 min to once a week).
- Choose the Number of Copies for your section backup files.
- To restore your notes, click on Show Backup Files > select the copy of your section > Restore.
- The Backup section will appear in the Inbox system notebook.
SCENARIO: If you choose the backups to generate every 30 minutes and set the number of copies to 5, you'll have 5 latest versions of one section with 30 minutes of edit between them. Once the Backup feature is enabled, your notebooks won't be backed up until the next scheduled backup interval. To back up manually, just select Backup Now.
Note: Make sure that you didn't set the backups to a folder with your actual notebook. If you see the files "Section name [2024-01-16_16-12-55]" appearing in your notebook, go to Settings and change Backup Destination folder.
If you want your backups to be available for Outline on your other devices, set iCloud Drive > Outline as destination folder on your Mac.
Note: On your Mac, data is saved to iCloud while you are logged in with your Apple ID in iCloud Settings. After you are logged out, backups will be saved to a destination on your hard drive specified in Backup Settings.
iOS (iCloud Backups)
On your iOS devices, Backups are always stored in iCloud if enabled. They are saved in a hidden folder and are reachable from Outline only. You can restore them from any of your Apple devices.
Just go to Settings > Backup > Restore From Backup > select the copy of your section. The Backup section will appear in the Inbox system notebook.
Don't forget to Check the Settings on your iOS devices:
- Go to System Settings, select iCloud;
- Tap the toggle switch to enable iCloud Drive. Next, turn on the option for Outline in the list of supported apps.
Other Backup options:
- If you use cloud storage to sync your notebooks, then your data is already being backed up there. You can either turn off Outline inner backups or keep them for total security of your data.
- Use Time Machine on Mac to back up the folder with your notebooks.
To locate your notebook, right-click on it in the navigation tree, select Properties and see the folder containing it.
To learn more about the Mac Time Machine, please visit Apple Support Center.