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Backups and safety

The short version

Your archive is plain files — your notes plus your photos. There is no database to corrupt and no closed format to get stuck in. Oakbough Family writes every note in one clean move, so even an interrupted save never leaves a half-written file. But "the files are plain" is not the same as "you have a copy" — which is why backups are a permanent part of the app.

Backups

Go to Settings → Backups and pick one folder for copies. It is the only folder question the app will ever ask you — and it is worth answering properly: another drive, a USB stick, a folder that syncs to the cloud. The app refuses a folder inside the archive, because such a copy would vanish along with the thing it was meant to rescue.

After that, the same thing happens every time:

  • a copy when you close the app, at most once a day, and only if something in the archive has actually changed since the last one;
  • the last ten copies are kept; older ones step aside on their own;
  • every copy is verified right after it is made — the app reopens the archive it just wrote and counts the notes. The day you need a backup is not the day to discover they were empty;
  • if the last copy has gone stale, the app says so in the status bar — it doesn't wait to be asked.

Don't want to wait for closing time? Back up now does it on the spot. Each copy is a single ordinary ZIP file — openable with anything, including without our program.

A copy is lossless, and that is the point: it takes everything, including the research log, your own kinds of events, saved Registry queries and your own front-matter keys. It never anonymizes living people — unlike an export, which is by design a projection meant for someone else. A backup rescues, an export publishes. Don't swap their jobs.

Restoring

In Settings → Restore a copy… you point at a copy and the app builds a separate archive from it ("Kowalski (copy from 2026-09-12)"). The archive you work in stays untouched — restoring on top of what you currently have open is how you lose data twice. Once you've checked the copy holds what you came for, switch to it and carry on; the old archive can be dropped from the list or left alone.

Besides that:

  • The .oakbough-family-backup/ folder inside the archive — where notes go when something would otherwise overwrite them: a replacing import, a mass rename of an event kind, a filename change during a merge. They are ordinary files under a dated folder; copy them back if you ever need to.
  • The History panel — a bonus you get if git is installed on your computer: the app then takes a snapshot after every save and before every operation that rewrites many notes at once, and the panel lets you read the differences and restore any earlier state. Git is not required and nothing stops working without it — History is a bonus for those who have it, not the recovery path your data leans on.
  • GEDCOM export (Settings → Data) is a portable copy that every genealogy program in the world will read. Just remember that GEDCOM doesn't carry everything (no research log, no place notes, none of your own keys) and that it hides probably-living people by default. As a safety copy it serves you less well than an ordinary backup of the archive.

A second computer

The model is single-person and deliberately simple: one archive, one computer at a time. There is no background sync and no merging of two versions of the same person — and we don't pretend otherwise.

To move your work to another computer, take the whole archive with you:

  1. Settings → Backups → Back up now, and take the copy file with you (USB stick, cloud, whatever).
  2. On the other computer: Settings → Restore a copy… and point at that file. A separate archive with all your work appears there.

Alternatively: the path to the archive folder is visible in Settings, so you can copy it by hand and bring it in from the other side — the welcome screen's Bring in an existing folder… button (which copies it in and leaves your original alone).

What we do not recommend: keeping one archive in a synced folder and editing it from two computers. That ends in "conflicted copy" files — as it does with any synced folder — and the app has no way to decide which version of your great-grandmother is the right one.

What if I edit a file by hand?

The app will cope: it notices the change on disk and loads it, and whatever it doesn't understand it leaves in the file untouched. A note saved in the wrong shape doesn't block the whole archive from opening: it shows up in Archive Health under the files that could not be read, and the file itself is left exactly as it is.

But that is a safety net, not a supported way of working. The editor of your tree is the app: only it keeps consistency, note identity and the links between notes straight. If you do edit something by hand, make a backup first.