Backup & restore
Export everything Make My Day itself stores — goals, links, outcomes, reviews and order — as a dated .zip you keep, and restore it by merging rather than overwriting.
Your appointments and tasks are never Make My Day’s to lose: they live in your Calendar and Reminders accounts, backed up however you already back those up. What sits on top of them — your goals, the links from work to those goals, your daily outcomes, your reviews, the order you arranged things in — is the app’s own layer, and this is how you take a copy of it.
You’ll find it in Settings, under Backups.
Making one
Back Up Now writes a dated .zip file, and Make My Day asks where to put it: a save dialog on the Mac, the save sheet on iPhone and iPad. Anywhere those offer is fair game — a folder on the device, a USB drive, iCloud Drive.
The file is created on your device and stays wherever you put it. It is never sent to us; there is nowhere for it to be sent.
There is no default folder and no remembered location: you say where every time. Nor is there a schedule — Make My Day never backs up on its own. It is a deliberate act, which is the point of it.
What’s inside
Everything Make My Day stores of its own:
- your goals and the links from tasks and events to them
- your daily outcomes
- your daily and weekly reviews
- the placements and order you gave things on the day, and the durations you set on tasks
- your settings
What isn’t
Your calendars and your reminders. They are not in the backup, because the app never owned them — they belong to your accounts, and they are already wherever those accounts are. A Make My Day backup restored onto an empty phone gives you back your planning layer; your appointments and tasks come back the way they always do, when you sign into your accounts.
That is a boundary worth understanding rather than a gap. It is the same reason you can delete the app and lose nothing.
Restoring one
Pick a file with Choose Backup…, then Restore Now. The app tells you afterwards how it went — Restored 12 new and updated 30 items.
The important part is what restoring does not do:
Restoring merges the backup into your data: items are added or updated, nothing is deleted.
Every record is matched by its own stable identity and then added or updated. Nothing in your current data is removed to make room, and nothing is replaced wholesale. Which means:
- Restoring into an empty app is a clean import.
- Restoring the same file twice changes nothing the second time.
- Restoring an older backup on top of current data adds back what’s missing rather than winding you back to that date.
If you want a genuinely clean slate, remove the app’s data first and then restore — the merge won’t do it for you, on purpose.
A backup made by a newer version of Make My Day than the one you’re running is refused with a message saying so, rather than half-imported.
When you’d actually use it
Day to day, you shouldn’t need it. Your planning layer syncs across your own devices through iCloud, so a new Mac normally arrives already populated.
It earns its place at the edges: before you do something drastic, when you want a copy of a year’s reviews that doesn’t depend on any sync working, or when you’d simply rather have the file.
Not to be confused with Restore Purchase, which is a separate thing in Settings and only tells the App Store to re-check your licence on this device. It has nothing to do with your data.
Related: Privacy & your data explains what the app stores and where, and Make My Day and your other apps covers what happens if you stop using it.