Understand application backup

The Backup feature enables you to back up the applications in your Creator account with data and restore them whenever required.  The following image shows the Backup Apps page and its functionalities.

Zoho Creator enables you to do the following in your Backups Apps page:

• Schedule backups whenever required — you can do a one-time backup or set the frequency of backups to take place automatically at regular intervals when you don't have time to backup data manually.
• Creates a new version of the backup file whenever you backup an application
• Download a copy of the backup file after the application is backed up. 
• Restore the backed up application — When you restore your backed up application, your application structure and data will be restored from the version that you chose.

Example

Assume a Customer Management Application for a publishing house. It consists of customer contact form, customer details form, and subscription form (including associated reports). You can schedule periodic backups to run on a weekly basis. In the event of an application crash, while making some updates, you can just restore the previous week's backup, so that a great deal of the developments made from the time of its creation till the latest backup is restored. If there is a need to undo a few updates made to the application, there is no necessity to remove the updates manually. You can only restore the application to a previous date when the updates were not yet made. Thus, this feature eliminates the hassles of rework.

Things to know

The backup file will be in a zip file format. It will include:

• A deluge script (.ds) file
• A set of .csv files containing the application data