BalanceWright copies your whole register every day you open it, and keeps a copy in a folder outside the app, where deleting the app does not reach it. Putting one back is a button. It cannot recover what another app lost. What it can do is keep the same thing from happening to you again, and below is how, including what a copy cannot survive.
A copy every day, without having to remember
The first time you open the app on a new day, it copies the whole register to a dated file. If that day is a Monday, it keeps a weekly copy as well. The app holds the last ten daily copies and the last five weekly ones, so you can go back through the last ten days you opened it, or back through the last five Mondays, which is about a month. There is nothing to switch on and nothing to schedule.
It copies the real file, not a summary: every account, every entry, every reconciled mark. The copy is made while the app is running, by the routine built for exactly that, so what lands is a whole copy and not a half-written one.
What is automatic, and what you choose once
Those daily copies still sit inside the app, so on their own they would go when the app goes. Copies that outlive deleting the app work like this.
- On Android 10 and newer, every copy is also written to your phone's own Documents folder, in a folder named BalanceWright. Nothing to set up, no permission to grant. Those files stay when the app is removed. Older Android phones do not have that folder rule, so they use the folder pick below instead.
- On iPhone and iPad, if you are signed in to iCloud with iCloud Drive turned on, every copy is also written to the app's own iCloud Drive folder, by itself. The app can confirm the copy reached that folder on your phone. When Apple uploads it is Apple's schedule, and the app does not claim to know.
- On either phone, tap Back up now once and the app offers you a folder to pick. It writes a copy there straight away, and keeps the folder only if that copy checks out. After that, every copy goes there by itself. On Android 11 and newer the system refuses Downloads and the top of internal storage, so pick a named folder such as Documents, or make a new one.
Every copy written outside the app is checked after it is written, against the size it should be. If the check fails, the screen says that folder could not be reached and that no copy was made there. What you see is the last thing that actually happened, so a failure is never papered over with an older success. A backup screen showing a stale date is how people find out too late.
Putting it back
There are two ways. You can restore from the list of copies held on the phone, one button per row. Or you can tap Restore from a saved copy, which opens your files, so you can bring back a copy from wherever you keep it: your folder, iCloud Drive, or one you emailed to yourself and saved back down. That is the door that works on a phone you have replaced, as long as the copy lives somewhere the new phone can reach.
Before anything is overwritten, the app checks that the file really is an undamaged BalanceWright register, and refuses if it is not. It also takes a safety copy of your register as it stands, and will not go ahead if that safety copy cannot be made, so the restore itself can be undone. If the overwrite fails partway, the app puts your register back from that safety copy. If even that fails, it tells you which copy in the list to restore by hand.
What a copy cannot survive
- Deleting the app while every copy is still inside it. On an iPhone with no iCloud Drive and no folder picked, that is the state you are in. The backup screen says which side of the line you are on, in those words: either a copy survives deleting this app, or nothing has left this app yet.
- Erasing or losing the phone, when the only copies outside the app are also on that phone. A folder in your own storage outlives deleting the app. It does not outlive a factory reset or a phone left in a parking lot. For that you want iCloud Drive, a folder that syncs, or a copy you sent somewhere else.
- Entries written after the copy was made. Restoring Tuesday's copy gives you Tuesday, and the app shows you the date and time of the copy before you confirm.
- Your own housekeeping. Copies in your folder are your files. If you delete them, they are gone. The app clears out only the older copies it put there itself, and does not touch anything else in that folder.
Why it is built this way
Public reviews of the biggest checkbook app on both stores describe years of entries disappearing after an update, and history reverting to an earlier year. That is the wound this app was built around, so backup and restore are not part of the paid upgrade. They work whether or not you have paid. BalanceWright is $9.99 once, with no subscription, no account to be logged out of, and no bank connection.
An honest note: BalanceWright is finished and going through store review, so it is not on sale yet. It arrives on the App Store first, and Android follows.