One of the greatest benefits of a local-first tracking app is complete privacy. Your inventory, personal progress notes, and project photos belong exclusively to you, stored on your own device. There’s no remote server tracking your habits, no mandatory internet connection, and no unexpected account lockout.
But local-only storage places a clear responsibility on you: protecting your own records. A lost, stolen, or damaged phone should never mean losing years of stitching history. Whether you’re moving to a new device or just building a disaster-recovery habit, knowing how to put together a complete, self-contained backup matters.
What a Real Backup Needs to Include
When crafters think about backing up their records, they often focus only on the text — a list of colors and project names feels like enough. But a text-only backup is missing something important: the photos.
If a backup exports only the text database while photos stay wherever they happened to be saved on the phone, restoring on a new device breaks the connection between the two. The system looks for a specific photo in a specific place, doesn’t find it, and your progress timeline or finished gallery ends up full of broken image placeholders instead of the pictures that were supposed to illustrate it. A real backup needs to pack the database and the photos together, so the two stay linked no matter where they end up.
Why One File Beats Several
Keeping separate files for different pieces of data — one for the stash, one for projects, a folder of loose images — creates room for something to go missing or get out of sync during a restore. If a robust backup bundles everything into a single compressed archive instead, the relationships between your threads, your logs, and your photos stay intact automatically, the file is easy to email or upload as one piece, and there’s only one thing to import rather than several that all need to line up correctly.
The same logic applies just as well without an app. On paper, rather than relying on a single physical notebook, scanning your journal pages into one multi-page PDF each month and saving it to a cloud drive gives you a single digital duplicate if the notebook is ever lost. In a spreadsheet, keeping your stash, your active projects, and your progress log as tabs within one workbook — rather than several separate files — and saving a dated copy periodically accomplishes much the same thing.
What to Expect When Restoring on the Free Tier
If a tool has a free tier with a registration cap — say, a maximum number of colors in your stash — that cap needs to apply during backup restoration too, not just during regular use.
The reason is straightforward: without that rule, a free user could register up to the cap, export a backup, delete and reinstall the app, register a different set up to the cap again, and merge the two backups to end up with an inventory well beyond what the free tier was ever meant to allow. To prevent that while staying fair to everyone else, a sensible restore process applies the same cap on import as it does everywhere else — the first colors up to the limit come back, and anything beyond that is skipped.
What matters is that everything else restores in full regardless of that cap. Your projects, your dated progress logs, your notes, and every photo attached to them come back completely, even if a portion of the stash colors had to be skipped. The parts of your record that represent your actual creative history are never held hostage by a registration limit that only concerns the size of your color inventory.
FlossLog’s Approach to Backup
FlossLog bundles your entire stash, your project details, your dated progress logs, and every photo into a single ZIP file with one tap, and hands it off through your device’s native share sheet so you can send it to cloud storage, email it to yourself, or move it to a computer. Restoring works the same way in reverse — one file, no separate steps to reconcile.
On the free tier, restoring a backup applies the same 50-color stash limit as everywhere else, but every project, progress log, and photo restores in full regardless. A single one-time Pro purchase removes the stash limit entirely, including on restore. Everything runs on your device, with no account and no subscription.
Download FlossLog on the App Store
Summary
A local-first tracking app offers real privacy and independence, but it puts the job of protecting your data on you. Bundling your stash, project details, and photos into a single backup file — rather than scattering them across separate exports — is what keeps a restore clean and complete, whether you’re moving to a new phone or just building a habit of protecting years of stitching history.
For a broader look at how these records fit into a full recording system, see our hub article: Notebook, Spreadsheet, or App? Tracking Your DMC Floss Stash and Cross-Stitch Projects
This article organizes information from a recording and organizing perspective. If you notice an error or outdated information, please contact us. Last verified: August 2026
