Backup & Restore

Keeping regular backups is critical to the operation of any computer system. This is especially true for an application like Tap Forms because often your most critical day-to-day information is stored there.

Tap Forms offers a simple method to backup your database documents to make sure you are always able to recover if things go wrong or if items are accidentally deleted. It happens.

To backup your documents, on the macOS version you have two options.

1. The Backup command in the File menu.
2. The Backup on Quit function on the General Preferences window.

The Backup Command

This is fairly straight forward. You select the Backup command from the File menu and choose where you’d like to save the backup file. Tap Forms will zip the currently opened document and name it with the current date and time the backup file was made.

Backup on Quit

A handy way of letting Tap Forms backup for you is when you’re quitting the app. If you leave a document opened and then quit Tap Forms, the Backup on Quit function will be triggered, creating a backup file in the chosen Backups Folder location. To configure the Backup on Quit function, go to the Preferences window and click on General if it’s not already selected. There you can enable the Backup on Quit function set how many backups you’d like to keep, and specify a folder where Tap Forms will save your backup files. It would be a good idea to set that to something such as an iCloud Drive or Dropbox folder. That way when Tap Forms backs up, the backups will then be stored in your selected cloud storage location.

Restore

Restoring is a little more complicated if sync is involved. This is because if you’re syncing and you restore your backup file, when sync happens again, whatever things in your document were deleted, will also be deleted again. So to avoid this you must disable sync on every device before you restore.

Here are some steps you can follow if you’re syncing using iCloud:

1. Open the document on your Mac and other devices.
2. Disable iCloud sync on each device.
3. Press the Delete from iCloud button on just one device.
4. Close the document on your other devices.
5. On the Mac, re-enable sync.
6. Wait for sync to finish.
7. Close the document on the Mac.
8. Re-open the document on the Mac.
9. Wait for the second sync cycle to complete.
10. Close the document one more time on your Mac.
11. Delete that document from your other devices.
12. Use the Send Document function from the Mac and send it to all your other devices.
13. Open the document on your other devices one at a time.
14. Re-enable sync on the other devices one at a time.
    

If you’re using other sync services such as IBM Cloudant or Apache CouchDB, you must login there and manually delete the database document that matches the Document ID you see on the Sync Settings screen. The Document ID is the “db-…..” value you see on the Sync Settings screens in Tap Forms.

To backup on the iOS version

1. Open the document you want to backup.
2. Tap on the Tools tab.
3. Tap on the Backup & Restore function.
4. Tap on the + button to make a new backup file.
5. Tap on the backup file to select it.
6. Tap on the Upload button.
7. Choose a location where you would like to upload your backup file to so its available on other devices.

To restore on the iOS version

1. Open the document you want to backup.
2. Tap on the Tools tab.
3. Tap on the Backup & Restore function.
4. Tap on the Download button.
5. Locate your backup file in your cloud storage service and tap on it to download it to Tap Forms.
6. Tap on the backup file.
7. Tap on the Restore Backup button.

You should also disable sync on the iOS version before you restore to it. And make sure that you restore only to one device and then use the Send Document function to send the restored document around to your other devices.

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