IN SHORT
- Backups are continuous with point-in-time restore — but they are a recovery mechanism, not your copy.
- Ask the studio to build the export you want into the system, so it is a button rather than a request.
- Pausing a plan stops building; the system keeps running and nothing is deleted.
- Closing the account keeps data for 90 days, then deletes it. Invoices are kept ten years because the law requires it.
Backups are not your export
The managed database behind every system is backed up continuously, with point-in-time restore. That protects against our failures — a bad deploy, a lost disk, a corrupted table.
It does not give you a copy of your data. A backup lives in our infrastructure and is restored by us. If what you want is a file you can open, hand to an accountant, or load into something else, that is an export, and it is a different thing.
The security page is explicit about one more caveat: restores are not drill-tested yet. That is stated rather than implied because a backup nobody has ever restored is a hypothesis.
Getting an export
Ask the studio for it in the same way you ask for anything else — "I want a button that downloads every invoice for a date range as a spreadsheet", "export all client records with their appointment history". Build it into the system rather than requesting it from us each time, and it becomes a button your staff can press.
Do it once before you need it. An export designed under time pressure, on the day someone has asked for the data, is the one that turns out to be missing a column.
What each ending actually does
| What happens | Your system | Your data |
|---|---|---|
| You pause or cancel the plan | Keeps running | Untouched. The studio stops building, that is all. |
| You run out of monthly credits | Keeps running | Untouched. Building pauses rather than billing you. |
| You delete a system | Gone | Gone with it — you are shown what would be lost first. |
| You close the account | Gone | Kept 90 days, then deleted. Invoices kept ten years. |
The ten-year exception
Invoices are kept for ten years because accounting law requires it, and that outlives the account. The document is re-rendered on each download from the snapshot frozen at the moment of issue, so what you get in 2035 is what was issued today.
The honest answer to “are we locked in?”
The data is exportable and the export is yours. The software itself is not portable to another host — it runs on this platform and moving it would mean rebuilding it somewhere else. That is the same position you are in with any hosted product, and stating it is more useful than a claim about openness that falls over the first time it is tested.
RELATED
Tutorial: your data and exports — the export, built once, before you need it
Security — the backup and retention wording in full
Terms — the contractual version of what happens on cancellation