Guides / Backup and restore
How to Back Up and Restore Your Data
Your records live on your device, which means backing them up is your job. Here is how Google Drive backup and CSV export work, and what to do when you switch phones.
Tally keeps your data on your device rather than on someone else’s server. That is the right default for financial records, and it comes with one obligation: if the phone goes in a river, so does everything you logged, unless you set up a backup.
It takes about a minute, once.
The two ways out
There are two, and they do different jobs.
Google Drive backup writes a complete snapshot to your own Drive account. This is the one that restores. Everything comes back: accounts, transactions, categories, recurring templates, holdings.
CSV export produces a spreadsheet file. This is the one you read. Open it in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets, pivot it, hand it to an accountant, keep it with your tax records. It is not designed to be restored from, and it will not bring your recurring templates or your portfolio back.
Most people want both, for different reasons.
Setting up Drive backup
Both live under Settings. You sign in to the Google account you want the backup to sit in, and Tally writes there.
Worth being clear about what “your own Drive” means, because a lot of apps use that phrase loosely. The file goes into your Drive. There is no Tally server holding a copy, no account with us, and nobody at CodeDMark can read it. The flip side is the one that matters to you: if you lose access to that Google account, we cannot recover the backup for you, because we never had it.
When you switch phones
The order matters here, and getting it wrong is the most common way people lose data.
Back up on the old phone first. Then install Tally on the new phone, sign in to the same Google account, and restore before you start entering anything.
Restoring replaces what is in the app. If you spend a week logging expenses on the new phone and then restore a backup from the old one, that week is gone. Restore first, then use it.
How often
If you log most days, a monthly backup is a reasonable floor. You would lose at most a month, which is annoying but survivable.
The better trigger is habit rather than calendar: back up whenever you have just done something you would hate to redo. Set up twenty recurring transactions? Back up. Entered a year of history you were catching up on? Back up. Finished a big reconciliation? Back up.
The month-end review is a natural hook, since you are already in the app updating prices and reading your summary.
Export CSV for tax time
The CSV includes your transactions with their categories and accounts, so it drops into a spreadsheet without cleanup.
This matters more for the investment side than for daily spending. Trade history is exactly the sort of thing you want in a spreadsheet when someone asks you to account for a year, and getting it out should never involve asking anyone’s permission. See the portfolio guide.
If you use the passcode lock
The passcode protects the app on your device. It is not encryption of the backup file, and it does not travel with an export.
If your CSV has your full financial history in it, treat that file the way you would treat a bank statement: do not leave it in a shared folder or email it to yourself on a work account.
The short version
Turn on Drive backup today. Back up before you switch phones and restore before you use the new one. Export a CSV whenever you want your data somewhere you control. None of it takes more than a minute, and all of it is cheaper than reconstructing a year of records from memory.
Tally is free on iOS and Android. No account, no monthly fee.
