Backing up a local-first app, properly

Local-first software puts the authoritative copy of your data on your machine. No account, no server, nothing to breach, nothing to shut down.

It also means there is no “restore my account” and no support team with database access to undo your mistake. A stolen laptop is a stolen archive.

The industry spent fifteen years training people out of the backup habit by making it unnecessary, and the people most drawn to local-first tools are often the ones with the least recent practice at it. So: what it actually takes.

The three failures, which need different answers

Corruption. A file goes bad — bad sector, a crash at the wrong moment, a filesystem having an afternoon.

You. Deleted the wrong thing, cleared something, went through your inbox too fast on a Monday.

Losing the machine. Theft, fire, a drive that does not spin up.

Many apps, Jot included, handle the first two themselves with rotating local copies — Jot keeps seven days of them beside the database. That is genuinely useful and it does nothing at all for the third case, because every one of those copies is on the same disk.

Only an off-device copy addresses losing the machine. Everything below is about that.

The fifteen-minute version

Find the folder. For Jot: %APPDATA%\com.wrivio.jot. Most local-first Windows apps are under %APPDATA% or %LOCALAPPDATA% with a similar name. Paste the path into Explorer’s address bar to confirm.

Point something at it that runs without you. In rough order of how likely you are to keep it working:

• A file-sync client you already use — OneDrive, Dropbox, Syncthing. Add the folder, and it is copied off-device continuously with no further thought. This is the correct answer for most people, because it requires no ongoing behaviour.
• Windows File History to an external drive. Built in, versioned, and only as good as how often that drive is plugged in.
• A whole-disk image on a schedule. The most complete and the most work.

A scheduled copy, if you want something you can read. For a single small file this is a two-line script and a Task Scheduler entry:

$stamp = Get-Date -Format 'yyyy-MM-dd'
Copy-Item "$env:APPDATA\com.wrivio.jot\jot.db" `
          "$env:USERPROFILE\OneDrive\backups\jot-$stamp.db"

Then restore it once. This is the step everyone skips and it is the only one that proves anything. Copy the backup somewhere else, open it, confirm your data is in it. An untested backup is a belief, not a backup.

What not to include

Do not sweep credential files into anything you will share or move casually.

Jot keeps two: an encrypted Microsoft refresh token and an encrypted AI provider key, both beside the database rather than inside it — precisely so the database stays safe to copy. They are tied to your Windows account and that machine, so copying them gains nothing.

If you back up the whole folder, they come along, and that is harmless. Just do not treat that archive as something to email yourself. The database alone is the part worth moving freely.

Frequency, honestly

For a capture tool, daily is plenty and weekly is defensible. The question is not “how much do I want to lose” in the abstract; it is “how much of this could I reconstruct”. A week of captured thoughts is mostly things you would remember again. A year of them is not.

Whatever the interval, it must not depend on you remembering. A backup that needs a human to initiate it is a backup that stops the first busy week.

The version most people should actually do

If the list above is going to result in nothing happening, do this instead and stop reading:

1. Put the app’s data folder inside a folder that OneDrive already syncs, or add it to your existing sync client.
2. Once, check that the file appears in the web view.

That is worse than a proper backup strategy and infinitely better than the strategy most people have, which is the one where their laptop is the only copy of everything.

The honest framing

Local-first is a trade, not a free upgrade. You get ownership, offline operation, no account, no breach surface and no subscription that pays for someone’s servers. You take on the part where the disk is your problem.

Any local-first tool that pitches the first half without mentioning the second is selling you something. This one puts it in the terms and in the security page, because the people most attracted to the pitch are exactly the ones least likely to be running backups.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.