Backup & restore

Everything XTop knows lives in one JSON file and one notes folder, so a backup is a small .zip you can put anywhere — including inside a folder your cloud client already syncs.

Open it from Settings → Backup.

What is in an archive

Each backup is a single file named xtop-backup-YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM.zip, holding:

xtop-db.json    collections, projects, aliases, commands, settings
notes/**             every markdown note

Manual and automatic

Pick a backup folder, then Back up now.

Or turn on automatic backup: every 6h / 12h / day / week, keeping the last 5–50 copies. Older ones are pruned for you.

The app checks 30 seconds after launch and every half hour after that, and only writes when the interval has actually elapsed — so leaving the machine on for a week does not produce a week of duplicates.

Cloud backup without an account

Point the backup folder inside your OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox folder. The sync client uploads it. No OAuth, no tokens, no API keys — and it keeps working even if this app never changes.

Restoring

Restore from the list of archives in the folder, or Restore from file… for one you brought from another machine.

Three things protect you:

1. It asks first, because restoring replaces live data.
2. Your current data is archived first, into a before-restore folder inside the app data folder — so a mistaken restore is itself undoable.
3. A damaged archive is rejected on its checksums before anything is touched, and an archive that is not a XTop backup is refused outright.

A detail that matters

Archives are ordered by the timestamp in the filename, not by file mtime. A sync client that touches every file — which they all do — therefore cannot confuse pruning into deleting the wrong ones.