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Export and portability

Export is how you take your data with you — to a fresh install, a new machine, or just a copy outside the app. Different from a backup: a backup restores this instance to an earlier point; an export is a clean, portable snapshot for carrying into a different instance.

What’s in an export

Settings → Data → Export backup (.zip) downloads one file with:

  • Your ledger, accounts, budget, investments, receipts, statements, and most app configuration.
  • Your chat history with Lucius.
  • A manifest, so an import can verify nothing was corrupted or tampered with before touching anything.

Left out deliberately — machine-specific, meaningless or wrong elsewhere: your login password, every connector’s credentials, and local runtime state (caches, logs, undo history). See Security & privacy for the full picture.

Importing

Settings → Data → Choose import file… uploads and applies an export.

  • Full replace, not a merge. Anything the archive doesn’t include resets to empty — for moving into a fresh or disposable instance, not layering one book onto another.
  • Verified before anything is written: every file is checked against the manifest’s checksum, and the archive can only write to the exact set of files it’s allowed to touch — a tampered archive can’t write somewhere it shouldn’t.
  • Reconnect every connector afterward (email, Telegram, a bank/brokerage sync, an AI provider key) — those credentials live on the old machine, not in your data.
  • The archive’s own format version is checked; an incompatible import is refused rather than silently applied.
  • operations/backup-and-restore — restoring this instance, not moving to a new one
  • operations/security-and-privacy — what’s stored, where, and what stays put