SnapShot Questions

Hey Howard,

Welcome to the Airtable community!

1. Restoring a base from a snapshot will create a brand new base without affecting your existing base.

2. Airtable doesn’t give you a place to view manual snapshots. Here’s more info in the documentation.

If you want more control over your data backups, we have an extension (On2Air Backups) that automatically backs up your Airtable bases to external storage on a set schedule.

Thanks for the quick reply. I had read the referenced documentation but it did not say if there is any other data/metadata not included in a snapshot. I had also looked earlier at On2Air, but as a nonprofit, the pricing would be more than what we are paying for airtable itself so that is not financially feasible in our case.

Most information about the base is included in the snapshot, including tables, views, fields, record data, automations, extensions, interfaces, etc. Is there something in particular you are concerned about?

Snapshots are stored on Airtable servers. It isn’t possible to store an entire snapshot in any other location.

Note that when you restore from a snapshot, all internal IDs are changed (table IDs, field IDs, record IDs, form share urls, etc.) so any 3rd party resources that interact with your base may also need adjusting if you restore from a snapshot.

Understood. We do have a Starter plan for lower budgets and a 50% nonprofit discount.

Feel free to reach out to us via chat on our website and we can help you out.

I was curious if “forms” are include in the snapshot, but from your list below I expect that is the case.

Yes, forms are included. Forms are a type of view.

Note however that if you restore a snapshot, the form in that new base will have a different share url. Thus, if you want to switch to the restored snapshot, you would need to publish the new url. Often snapshots are used to see old configurations or record data, and then people manually recreate them in the original base.