Backups & Recovery

Protect your organization data with automated daily snapshots, manual backups, and point-in-time restore.

Overview

Dubbl automatically creates daily snapshots of your entire organization data. You can also create manual backups, download snapshots to keep offline, and restore from any backup if something goes wrong.

Backups capture all entity data (accounts, contacts, invoices, bills, journal entries, products, and more) as a single JSON file stored in S3. Document file contents are stored separately and are not affected by restore operations.

Backup types

Type	Description	Created by
Scheduled	Automated daily snapshots for all active organizations	System cron
Manual	On-demand snapshots created from the Backups settings page	User
Uploaded	Previously exported backup files re-imported into the system	User

Plan limits

	Free	Pro
Retention	7 days	30 days
Manual backups	3	10
Rate limit	5 per hour	5 per hour

Creating a backup

Go to Settings > Backups
Click Create Backup and confirm
The backup will appear in the list once complete

Downloading a snapshot

You can download a full snapshot of your current data directly to your computer without saving it to the server.

Go to Settings > Backups
Click Download Snapshot
A JSON file will be saved to your downloads folder

This is useful for keeping offline copies or transferring data between Dubbl instances.

You can also download any existing backup by clicking the download icon next to it in the backup list.

Uploading a backup

If you have a previously downloaded Dubbl snapshot file, you can upload it:

Go to Settings > Backups
Click Upload Backup
Select the .json backup file
The file will be stored and appear in your backup list

Restoring from a backup

Restoring replaces all current organization data. A snapshot of your current data is automatically saved before the restore begins, so you can undo the restore if needed.

Go to Settings > Backups
Click the restore icon next to the backup you want to restore
Confirm the restore operation
All current records will be soft-deleted and replaced with the backup data

After restoring, your previous data is available in the Trash for 30 days if you need to recover individual items.

Rate limiting

To prevent abuse, backup creation is rate-limited to 5 snapshots per hour per organization. This limit applies to both stored backups and download-only snapshots. If you hit the limit, wait for the cooldown period shown in the error message.

Backup contents

Each backup includes:

Chart of Accounts
Contacts
Invoices and invoice lines
Bills and bill lines
Journal entries and journal lines
Quotes, credit notes, debit notes, and purchase orders (with lines)
Products / inventory items
Bank accounts
Expenses
Payments
Recurring templates
Projects, budgets, fixed assets, and loans
Tax rates and cost centers
Document metadata (not file contents)

Differences from Import & Export

	Import & Export	Backups
Format	CSV (individual entities)	JSON (full org snapshot)
Purpose	Migration from external tools	Disaster recovery
Scope	One entity type at a time	All entities at once
Restore	Manual re-import	One-click restore
Source mapping	QuickBooks, Xero, etc.	Dubbl native format

API

Backups can also be managed via the REST API:

GET /api/v1/backups - List backups
POST /api/v1/backups - Create a manual backup
GET /api/v1/backups/:id/download - Download a backup file
POST /api/v1/backups/:id/restore - Restore from a backup (requires { confirm: true })
DELETE /api/v1/backups/:id - Soft-delete a backup
POST /api/v1/backups/upload - Upload a backup file
GET /api/v1/backups/download-snapshot - Download a snapshot without saving

MCP tools

AI agents can manage backups through the MCP server:

list_backups - List organization backups
create_backup - Create a manual backup
restore_backup - Restore from a backup
delete_backup - Delete a backup

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