TimeLeaf can save your workspace's settings and data to your own cloud storage on a schedule, and restore from a backup file. Everything is under Settings › Backups & Data.
What you need
- An admin account.
- Downloading a backup by hand works on every plan.
- Scheduled backups and restore need the Professional plan or above.
- For scheduled backups: an Amazon S3 bucket (or an S3-compatible service such as MinIO or Backblaze B2), or an Azure Blob Storage container, and credentials that can write to it.
Set up scheduled backups
Prepare your storage
Amazon S3: create a bucket, and an IAM user with s3:PutObject, s3:GetObject and s3:DeleteObject on it. Turning on bucket versioning is a good extra safeguard.
Azure Blob Storage: create a storage account and a container (for example timeleaf-backups), and copy the connection string from the storage account's Access Keys. Soft delete on the container is a good extra safeguard.
Add a schedule
Go to Settings › Backups & Data and click Add Backup Schedule. Give it a Name and choose the Provider: Amazon S3 / S3-Compatible or Azure Blob Storage.
Enter the storage details
For S3, enter the Bucket Name, Region, Access Key ID and Secret Access Key. Leave the endpoint blank for AWS; for an S3-compatible service, enter its endpoint URL. For Azure, enter the Connection String and Container Name.
Choose when and how long
Under Schedule, pick the Interval (Hourly, Daily or Weekly), the Time (UTC) and, for weekly, the Day of Week. Set Retention (days) (30 by default).
Choose what to include
Under Options, keep Include user data on to back up employees and their records, and leave Include sensitive off unless you need password hashes and secrets in the file (see below).
Test and save
Click Test Connection to check TimeLeaf can write to your storage, then Save Backup Schedule.
Daily and weekly backups start within about 15 minutes of the time you set. Hourly backups run about once an hour.
Check your backups
The Backup Schedules list shows each schedule with when it last ran, the size of the last backup or the error if it failed, and its retention. Use the run button to take a backup now, the Enabled switch to pause or resume a schedule, and the delete button to remove it.
After each backup, TimeLeaf deletes backups older than the retention period from your storage.
What a backup contains
Each backup is one JSON file.
Always included: workspace settings, leave policies, holidays, blackout periods, teams, and your single sign-on, messenger and calendar integration settings.
With Include user data on: employee records, policy assignments, balance adjustments, leave requests and approvals, blackout exceptions, calendar events, out-of-office statuses, approval delegations, notifications, timesheets and time entries. Restore does not re-import timesheets or time entries; they are in the file so it holds your pay records.
Not included: company closures, locations, approval workflows, accrual rules, work patterns, shift schedules, overtime policies and time bank records, contracts, clients and invoices, on-call schedules and alerts, and uploaded files (photos, attachments, signed contract PDFs).
Sensitive values: with Include sensitive off (the default), password hashes, tax and bank details, single sign-on client secrets and messenger tokens are replaced with a marker instead of being saved.
Download a backup by hand
Under Manual Backup & Restore, choose whether to tick Include user data & requests and Include secrets (passwords, tokens), then click Download Backup. The file is saved to your computer.
Restore from a backup
A restore starts as soon as you choose the file. It adds records from the file and updates existing ones. It never deletes anything.
Get the backup file
For a scheduled backup, download the JSON file from your storage first.
Choose the file
Under Manual Backup & Restore › Restore Backup, choose the JSON file. TimeLeaf shows the result, with any errors and notes.
A value that was replaced with the redaction marker is never written over the current value of an existing account. If the backup came from a different workspace address, the app address and single sign-on redirect URIs are updated to match this workspace.