Export before you delete, always
The confirmation says it cannot be undone because it cannot. A minute spent exporting is cheaper than the conversation that follows otherwise.
TUTORIALS / RUNNING IT FOR REAL
Your data: exports, ownership and leaving
The system you build is yours, and so is the data in it. That sentence is in the terms, and this page is what it means on an ordinary Tuesday when you want a copy of something.
4 minutes
Reading time
Nothing but an account
What you need
The studio, and your system
Where you do it
01 Step by step
Yours, and provably so
We claim no ownership of the system or the data. We do not mine it and we do not train anything on it. You can export it at any time, and if you leave you take it with you.
The test of a claim like that is not the sentence — it is whether getting your data out is easy on a day nobody is trying to be helpful. So it is worth doing once, early, while nothing is urgent.
01
Ask for the export you want
Say what you need a copy of and in what form — the client list as a spreadsheet, this year's invoices, everything. Exports are asked for the same way any other change is.
02
Build it into the system
Better than asking each time: have a download button on the screen your bookkeeper uses. Then the export is part of the system rather than a favour.
03
Do it once before you need it
Run one export while things are calm and open the file. Knowing what comes out, and that it opens in the program you use, is worth far more than the assurance that it can be done.
04
Know what pausing does not do
If the monthly allowance runs out, building stops — but your data stays exactly where it is and you can still export it. Running out of credits does not lock your data away.
05
Know what closing does
You can close the account at any time. After it closes we keep the data for 90 days in case you change your mind, then delete it. Invoices are kept for ten years because accounting law requires it.
02 In your own words
Deleting a system is not the same as leaving
Deleting one system from your account is immediate and final: it stops working straight away and everything in it is removed a few minutes later. There is no undo, so export first if there is anything in it you might want.
Closing the account is the slower one, with the 90 days behind it. The two are easy to confuse and only one of them is reversible.
ABOUT BACKUPS, HONESTLY
The database is continuously backed up and point-in-time restore is available. What we will not claim is that we have rehearsed it in anger — a restore nobody has ever performed is a plan rather than a capability, and the security page says so.
Which is the real argument for keeping your own export of anything you could not reconstruct: not distrust of the backups, just the ordinary rule that the copy you hold is the one you control.
03 What to watch for
A
B
Keep one copy off the platform
A quarterly export sitting in your own storage costs nothing and answers the "what if" question that auditors and worried partners both ask.
C
Personal data has rules of its own
If your system holds customer records, you are the one the GDPR calls the controller. Being able to export and delete an individual's data is worth building before someone asks for it.
04 Where to go next