A copy that doesn't need us

Spleen keeps your writing safe, but a backup you can only reach through Spleen is not much of a backup. So the nightly copy goes to your own Dropbox.

Safe in more than one place

Spleen already tries hard not to lose your writing. It saves while you work. Snapshots let you look back. Archive and Trash give you somewhere to put words without making them disappear.

But all of those things still live inside Spleen.

That is useful when you delete the wrong paragraph or change your mind about a chapter. It is less useful when the thing you are worried about is Spleen itself. A backup should not depend on the same service as the original. If you need us in order to reach both copies, there is really only one copy.

So the nightly backup goes somewhere else: your own Dropbox.

A Spleen Archive, outside Spleen

Once Dropbox is connected under Account, Spleen checks your projects every night. When a project has changed, it puts a new Spleen Archive in Apps/Spleen in your Dropbox.

This is the same kind of file you can make yourself from the Export menu. It holds the writing and research trees, notes, annotations, snapshots, Archive, and Trash. Download it and you can import the project again later. The import makes a new project, so restoring a backup never quietly writes over the one you already have.

Dropbox gives Spleen access to that one app folder and nothing else. The copies in it belong to you. Disconnect Dropbox and they stay there. Delete your Spleen account and they stay there too.

That last part is the reason for the feature. Spleen makes the copy, but it does not get to be the only way you keep it.

Only when the work changed

Making another identical file every night would look busy without making the writing any safer. Instead, Spleen looks at the contents of each project and uploads a new copy only when something has changed.

Each project has its own folder. Spleen keeps the newest ten copies there and removes older ones after a new copy arrives. That gives you more than the latest version without letting the folder grow forever.

This led to a small wording problem. The Backups page originally showed a date called “Last backup”. On a quiet night, Spleen could check every project, find nothing new to copy, and move that date forward. The newest file in Dropbox would still be from an earlier night. Both dates were right, but together they looked wrong.

It now says “Up to date as of”. That is what the date really means: at that moment, Spleen checked that every project was safely copied. A backup screen should tell you what it knows, not make routine work sound more dramatic than it was.

When a backup cannot happen

Dropbox may be full. Its connection may have been removed. A short outage may happen at exactly the wrong time.

Spleen cannot promise that every attempt will succeed. It can notice the difference, show what went wrong under Backups, and try again. A brief connection problem stays quiet and is retried. If access has been lost, Spleen asks you to reconnect. You can also choose Back up now whenever you want to make or check the copies straight away.

That is about as exciting as I want a backup feature to be.

On Library, you connect Dropbox once and then mostly forget about it. The useful part happens later, if you ever need one of the files and find it waiting somewhere that does not need Spleen to keep it safe.