Back up your budget

Export your whole budget to a single file you can restore on any iPhone.

Pentos holds your budget on your iPhone and nowhere else. No copy is made anywhere on your behalf, so backups are yours to make.

This is the most important page in this documentation.

Steps

To back up your budget, follow these steps:

1. Open the Settings tab.
2. Tap Export Backup.
3. Choose where to save or share the file.

The file carries everything: accounts, transactions, categories, assignments, holds, rules, schedules, goals, payees, and your settings. Restoring it reproduces the budget exactly.

Where to put it

Somewhere that is not only this iPhone. A backup sitting in the Files app on the device it came from does not survive losing the device.

Anywhere your phone can save to works. Once the file leaves Pentos it is an ordinary file, subject to whatever protections its destination has rather than to Pentos’s.

How often

Monthly is a reasonable floor, and after anything you would hate to redo: a long import, a big cleanup, an evening of reconciling.

Keep more than one. The point of a backup is to have a version from before whatever went wrong, and the most recent one may already contain it.

The CSV export is not a backup

Export Transactions CSV writes your transactions as a plain spreadsheet, which is the right file for a spreadsheet or another tool.

It carries transactions and nothing else. No assignments, no rules, no schedules, no goals, no account settings, and no history of what you budgeted. It cannot restore a budget.

Use it alongside a backup, never instead of one.

Next steps

• Restore from a backup
• Export to CSV