Manual & Automatic Backups

A localization project can easily become pretty complex undergoing constant changes in translation methods, workflows, and team composition. With that comes all kind of potential for error. New team members are not familiar with tools yet and accidentally overwrite translations, languages are deleted in the heat of the moment, miscommunication leads to a reset of nearly complete translation workflows or some technical error in the process leads to the wrong translations in the wrong place - we have seen it all.

So far, we were always able to help our people to restore their translations, but we felt it was time to hand these tools to the user base for an even more convenient experience. With our last release, we added two ways to make sure you can revert whatever might go wrong: Automatic Backups and Manual Backups. You can access the backups per app on the Project Settings page.

Option 1 - Automatic Backups

As the name already states, these backups are created and saved automatically every day. Depending on your subscription, you can have a certain number of these backups. If the maximum is reached, the system will delete the oldest backup to have space for a new one.

Before a new backup is created, the system will check if there have been any changes since the last one was saved and skip saving a new one if not. This way, Automatic backups will always stay relevant by holding on to your last changes.

Automatic Backups are our insurance for all these moments you realize, a “terrible” mistake just happened and you have to roll back. You can do that now with the press of just one button.

Option 2 - Manual Backups

This kind of backup will only be created if you trigger it. As with the automatic ones, you have only a certain number available but in contrast, they are therefore not overwritten. Once you create a manual backup it will be kept indefinitely. Only if you reached your limit and need to save a newer backup you will have to delete one of your older ones.

This feature is great to create a snapshot of your localization project where you feel comfortable to always roll back to e.g before you start a big overhaul of your translations and just saving a status where your translation feel “complete”.

How to use backups to restore your app

Simply go to your App Settings page and you will see a list of each, all your Automatic and all your Manual Backups. On the right of each list item, you'll find the "Import Backup" button. Simply chose to which one you want to go back to and voila.

Important: When the backup is imported, it will overwrite the current state of your app! If you want to keep anything of the current state, follow the instruction in the next section.

How to pick and choose which changes you want to keep

Sometimes you realize that something went wrong earlier but in the meantime, you made good progress that you don’t want to lose by rolling back everything with the backup. In this circumstance, you can use a combination of Applanga dashboard features to use a backup to fix errors while keeping what was added or changed since then.

1. First, download the current state of your translations by exporting for the whole app with “Export Bundled Translations” or just for the specific languages you need (we recommend using the .xliff file format).
2. Go to the App Settings page and use the backup of your choice to rollback to the status you want to go back to.
3. Use your export from step 1 and import these translations again BUT chose the “Only import as Draft” option from the Importer Option dialogue.
4. Now, the translations from your backup are in the “Published” fields, while your latest work is in the “Draft” fields.
5. Apply the “Inconsistencies” filter. The list will no only show those keys, where the “Published” and “Draft” values differ, so where there was a change since the time of the backup.
6. Go through the list and approve the “Draft” values where you want to keep your changes.
7. Set the filter back to “All”, select all keys and the list and use the “Clear Draft” option from the “More” drop-down to get rid of all the “Draft” values you don’t want to keep
8. You just have fixed all the errors but kept all the good work you did in between - Congrats! Go take a break.