To Move Forward

[Richard_Noakes]

I am a convert to Airtable and am constantly experimenting with it but…

To move this really rather great product forward there has to be a backup/export facility.

I really am amazed reading this forum how people seem willing to put sensitive information or build business critical systems round it without backup, you can guarantee they will be the first to complain when it inevitably suffers downtime, and yes I know you can export tables as .csv files but its hardly the same or robust.

Make it a paid option if need be, in fact make the whole product a paid service, I for one would be happy to pay for a host of new features, the value to my business would more than balance a reasonable monthly cost, but like every feature request forum I see it is filled with niche and peripheral requests which without backup or a regular income stream for the developers are just not practical or reasonable to request or expect. Just looking at the feature requests today i see gant charts, graphing, captchas on forms, report builders, etc etc. in a free product… Really!!

So my wish list would I guess be Airtable premium, a robust app, which would businesses could adopt while perhaps keeping a paired down Airtable basic for others or as a try before buy, otherwise I would worry airtable would not be sustainable as a business model, and this good product will disappear…

I will now sit back and await flames.

[Howie]

Not sure what you mean by “hardly the same or robust,” since by definition Airtable content can only be displayed in full fidelity via the Airtable interface. CSV is the most universal export option possible, and for instance it’s the most common way of exporting/importing data from Salesforce. We also offer an API with which you can fetch data directly and programatically, as an alternative to manual CSV exports.

[Richard_Noakes]

Hi

Make it a service the works locally and syncs through your servers as Omnifocus does.

We already have desktop and mobile apps, could these not be made to sync a local and remote copy, effective functioning as standalone apps? This would also allow for perhaps Airtable to be used for sensitive information in “private” bases only held locally, as well as remote held solutions for less sensitive data. Not everything benefits from a 100% cloud only based system.

This would also provide multiple copies, as well as having a local usable backup. I appreciate this would need to be a paid subscription service, but the value for many would be worth the expense I would guess.