Feature Request: Automatic backup support from within the App on iOS & MacOS

After going all in - Bear contains many important data that I don’t want to lose. There are many requests here for more protection of the data regarding encryption and ADP.

What stuns me is that there are no requests for automatic backups to your local device, e.g. iPhone, iPad or Mac. Personally, I think it is necessary for a note taking and kind of PKM app to have safeguards against unwanted data loss (e.g. sync issues, accidental deletions, …). Therefore comes backup into the game.

From within in Bear on the Mac and on iOS you can manually export all notes to an external destination (Backup and Restore Your Notes in Bear).

You can also create on the Mac a shortcut with a Bear Backup action where you can somewhat manually automate the backup process. However, that Bear shortcut action is only available on the Mac and not on iOS. Therefore it is not possible to automate that on iOS. Futhermore there isn’t a non technical solution to run the shortcut automatically on the Mac (you have to use and configure the shortcut and the external apps as well).

Therefore I kindly request the following features:

  • Automatic Backup option from within Bear on iOS and Mac
    • with selection of a local backup destination on those devices or in an user selected destination of the files app (e.g. Dropbox, iCloud drive, Webdav, …)
    • some kind of retention management, e.g. specify a number of backups to keep
    • for users with a lot of attachments it might be useful to make in certain intervalls a full backup with the attachments and in shorter, daily intervalls backups of the notes without attachments
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The requests for whole db backup has come in the form of much discussion on revision history vs whole db backup. Revision history with rollback capability is where those requests have generally landed as more useful. I believe the Bear team is considering the revision history request.

I totally agree with you @dahan , and have also requested this several times.

While waiting for years, I had to come up with some shortcut/Phython sollution for Backup and versoning/incremental backup.

I made a rather lenghty post with links and explantaions of the two shortcuts

  1. Bear Special Backup - Shortcuts
  2. Bear Versioning - Shortcuts

and I’m including the link to this post here:

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