How to Back Up and Export Your Saved Form Text

Local data is a genuine advantage right up until the moment you need a new computer. Everything an extension stores lives in one directory, and that directory is deleted without ceremony when the extension is removed, when you reset a profile or when you reinstall an operating system.

An export is what separates data you own from data you are borrowing.

What deleting a profile takes with it

Be concrete about the risk, because it is easy to underestimate.

• Uninstalling the extension. Everything it stored goes. There is no separate copy.
• Clearing browsing data. The "cookies and other site data" option does not touch extension storage, but "clear all data" and some reset options do.
• Resetting Chrome settings. A full reset removes extensions and their storage.
• Reinstalling the operating system. Gone.
• A new computer. Not migrated automatically, unless the tool syncs through a server, which a local-first tool by definition does not.
• Corruption. Storage occasionally becomes unreadable after an unclean shutdown. This is rare and it is total.

None of these are faults. They are what keeping data on your own device means, and the trade is only fair if you know about it.

What a usable export looks like

Export is one of the easiest features to fake. These are the things that matter:

1. It contains the text. Not a list of records with the content omitted, and not a reference to a server you have to ask.
2. It is readable without the tool. JSON, plain text or Markdown. Open it in any editor and you can see what you have.
3. It includes the context. The page address, the page title, the field name and the timestamp. Text without those is a pile of anonymous paragraphs you will not recognise.
4. It is generated locally. An export that needs a server to produce is not an export.

Form ReDraft exports all four. The settings page writes a JSON file containing each draft with its page address, title, field name, timestamp, word count and the text itself. No draft is skipped because it could not be decrypted, though those appear with empty text rather than disappearing silently.

How to export from Form ReDraft

Open the settings page from the gear icon in the popup, then use the export button. The file downloads as redraft-export.json.

It contains a top-level object with the extension name, a schema version, an export timestamp and a count, then an array of entries. Each entry has the fields listed above. You can read it in any text editor, and it stays readable if Form ReDraft disappears tomorrow.

Set a reminder to export before you do anything drastic. Moving machines, a major browser update you do not trust, a profile reset and reinstalling your operating system are the four moments it is worth spending ten seconds on.

Why importing is not automatic

Worth explaining, because it looks like an omission.

Form ReDraft encrypts drafts with a key generated on your device when it is installed. A copied storage folder arrives on a new machine with data that matches nothing, because the key that reads it is either absent or different. Importing ciphertext from one install into another would therefore produce a vault full of unreadable entries, which is worse than an empty one because it looks like data.

So the export is deliberately plaintext and portable, and the import is deliberately manual. A JSON file containing your words can be opened, searched, pasted anywhere and read by any program. That is a better backup format than an encrypted blob, even though it is less private in the moment you hold it. Keep it somewhere you trust, and delete it once you have moved what you need.

This is the same trade-off described in what local first software is, applied to backups.

Inspecting storage without any export at all

Every extension has a storage area you can look at directly, which is useful when auditing rather than backing up.

1. Open chrome://extensions, turn on developer mode and note the identifier of the extension.
2. Open DevTools with F12 and go to the Application tab.
3. Expand Extension Storage and select the extension.
4. Browse the entries. Values that are not encrypted are readable in plain text.

Note that Chrome does not offer a straightforward way to copy a whole extension storage area from here, which is exactly why a real export feature matters. This technique is for reading and auditing, not for backup.

A short routine

Local-first software trusts you to take responsibility for your own backups. In practice that is about five minutes a year:

• Export before any major change to your machine or browser.
• Keep the export somewhere separate from the machine, so a disk failure does not take both copies.
• Delete the export once you have moved anything you cared about.
• For anything genuinely irreplaceable, keep a copy in the place you already write things down.

The last point is not filler. A recovery tool is a safety net for text you have already written, and no safety net is a substitute for the archive you keep of the things that matter.

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