Automatic Backups: Set It Once, Forget About It

Backing up your data is a chore that lives permanently on the "I should really do that" list. You know it matters. You know that one day a laptop dies, an account gets locked, or you fat-finger a delete you cannot undo. And yet the manual step of remembering to export a fresh copy every week is exactly the kind of task that quietly never happens, right up until the moment you desperately wish it had.

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WIMM's Automatic Backups exist to take the remembering out of it. You turn the feature on once, pick how often you want a fresh copy, set a password, and then WIMM quietly saves an encrypted snapshot of your data on that schedule for as long as you keep it running. No reminder to ignore. No weekly ritual. The backup that saves you is the one that happened without you thinking about it.

The thing most budgeting apps do not do at all

Here is a small industry secret: most budgeting apps have no backup story whatsoever. The best case is a manual export buried in a settings menu, one you have to remember to run yourself. The common case is nothing at all, just a cheerful assumption that the company's own database will never let you down and that you will never want a copy you control.

WIMM takes the opposite view. Your data is yours, and you should be able to hold a copy of it that does not depend on us staying online, on your subscription, or on your account staying accessible. Manual backup and restore have always been free for everyone in WIMM, and they stay free. Automatic Backups build on that same foundation and make the copy happen on a schedule, so the safety net is there even on the weeks you never open the app.

How to turn it on

Everything lives in one place. Open Settings, go to Backup & Restore, and find the Automatic Backups card. There are three small decisions, and you make each of them exactly once.

1. Set a backup password. This password encrypts every automatic backup. Choose something strong and store it somewhere safe, like a password manager. WIMM cannot recover this password for you, and that is the point: a backup only you can open is a backup nobody else can read.
2. Pick a schedule. Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. Daily is the belt-and-suspenders option. Weekly is a comfortable default for most households. Monthly is fine if your finances do not change much day to day.
3. Flip the switch on. That is the whole setup. From here WIMM handles the rest on its own.

Once it is on, a small background job checks each day whether your next backup is due, and if it is, it generates a fresh encrypted snapshot and files it away. A successful backup is completely silent. You will not get a "we backed you up" email cluttering your inbox, because a backup working as intended is not news.

What is actually in a backup, and how it is protected

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An automatic backup is a complete, portable snapshot of your WIMM data: your accounts, transactions, budgets, bills, goals, and debts. It is byte-for-byte the same .wimmbackup file you would get from a manual download, which means a backup made automatically restores exactly the same way a manual one does. There is no second-class automatic format to worry about.

Every automatic backup is encrypted with your backup password using the same strong encryption WIMM uses for a manual backup. The file is stored in private storage that is not publicly reachable by a URL. Downloading or restoring one always goes through an authorized, logged-in path tied to your account, never a link someone could stumble onto.

There is a subtle safeguard worth calling out. Each backup remembers the exact password that encrypted it. So if you change your backup password later, your older backups do not suddenly become unreadable. Each one can still be opened with the password that was in effect when it was made. Changing your password protects future backups without stranding the ones you already have.

WIMM keeps your three most recent copies

You do not accumulate an endless pile of backup files. WIMM keeps the three most recent automatic backups for you and quietly prunes anything older as new ones arrive. Three is enough to cover the realistic case, where a problem you want to roll back from happened recently, without turning your account into a storage locker of stale snapshots.

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Each of those three copies shows up right there on the Backup & Restore card, listed with its date and size. Two buttons sit next to each one:

• Download pulls the encrypted file down to your own device, so you can keep an off-site copy somewhere you control.
• Restore replaces your current WIMM data with the data from that snapshot, in one click. Because a restore overwrites everything, WIMM asks you to confirm first. It is the button you reach for after a bad import, an accidental bulk delete, or a "wait, what happened to my budgets" moment.

The one time WIMM does speak up

A silent success is the norm. A failure is the exception, and it is the exception WIMM makes noise about, because a backup you think is running but is not is worse than no backup at all.

If a scheduled backup ever fails, WIMM emails you and drops an in-app notification so you know your safety net has a hole in it. WIMM will try again on your normal schedule, but you get told the moment something goes wrong rather than discovering it later when you needed the copy that never got made.

There is one more case WIMM will flag. Automatic Backups is a Premium feature, and if your Premium subscription lapses, the scheduled backups pause. WIMM lets you know when that happens rather than silently stopping, so you are never under the impression a backup is running when it is not. Your existing backups and the always-free manual backup and restore stay available regardless.

Set it up now

The best backup is the one already running before you need it. If you are on Premium, open Settings, go to Backup & Restore, set a password, pick Daily, Weekly, or Monthly, and turn it on. That is the entire task, and it is the last time you will have to think about it.

If you want to look around WIMM first, the live demo opens with a sample household so you can explore the app without creating an account: app.wimm.money/demo. When you are ready to protect your own data, sign in and set your schedule once.