Backup and restore

Your TaktSignal data lives in a local database on your computer. Backups protect the part that exists only in TaktSignal — alert outcomes, notes, owners, counts, receipt checks, variance explanations, users and settings. The ERPNext data itself can always be read again from ERPNext.

Back up now

Control Center → Backups → Back up now. The backup is a single file in the backups folder inside your data folder, with a small description file next to it (version, date, size, checksum).

Computer	Backup folder
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/TaktSignal/backups
Windows	%LOCALAPPDATA%\TaktSignal\backups
Linux	~/.local/share/taktsignal/backups

To keep a copy somewhere else (another disk, your company's file share), copy the .dump file and its .json file. A backup contains everything TaktSignal has stored — including customer and supplier names and user accounts (with password hashes) — so store copies as carefully as the ERPNext data itself.

What a backup does not contain: the ERPNext API key and secret and the local database password. They stay in your computer's password store. After restoring on a new computer, enter the ERPNext keys again.

Automatic backups

TaktSignal also creates a backup automatically before every update and before every restore. There is no scheduled daily backup in the Community Alpha — use Back up now before experiments. Old backups are not deleted automatically; remove the ones you no longer need from the backups folder.

Restore

Control Center → Backups → choose a backup → Restore (or Import a backup file first).

1. TaktSignal checks the file: that it is a TaktSignal backup, that its checksum matches, and that it is not from a newer TaktSignal version.
2. It backs up your current data first (a before restore backup).
3. It restores into a separate database, applies any database updates and starts TaktSignal on it.
4. Only when that works does it switch over. The previous database is kept aside, not deleted.

If anything fails on the way, TaktSignal returns to the data you had before — “The restore did not complete.” means nothing was lost.

Rollback after an update

If an update does not start correctly, TaktSignal switches back to the previous version automatically. If the update had already changed the database structure, TaktSignal stays stopped and asks you to restore the before update backup listed under Backups — an older version is never started on a newer database. See Updates.

Uninstalling

Uninstalling keeps your data and backups by default. Removing all data also removes the backups — copy the ones you want to keep first. See Uninstall.