Backup, Restore, and Version Control

Backup is one of those things that you typically don’t think about until you really need it, and by then, it’s too late. Don’t find yourself in that situation where you’ve lost weeks or even months worth of work because you didn’t think about backing up your work until it was too late. Fortunately, when it comes to backing up your writing, Ulysses makes it incredibly easy.

To access your backup settings for Ulysses on your Mac, go to the Ulysses menu and select Preferences or use the keyboard shortcut, Command-,. Select the Backup tab to access the Backup Preferences. You can toggle back up on and off if you’d like, but it is enabled by default in Ulysses on both your Mac and your iOS devices. Now, your Ulysses backup is not stored in the cloud. It is stored locally on your device.

On the Mac, Ulysses stores hourly backups of the last 12 hours of work, daily backups of the last seven days of work, and weekly backups for the last six months of work. These backups are stored inside your user’s library folder, so you’ll definitely want to make sure that you are backing up your Mac as well.

If you click the Options button, you’ll be able to see the available backups you can restore from. You can also click the button to Backup Now if you’d like, but you won’t be able to restore any of your previous work from here, so for now, let’s click Done and go back to the Backup Preferences screen.

Now, let’s say you want to restore a sheet from a backup that is no longer in your Ulysses library. Click the Browse Backups button to browse all the available backups and locate the sheet that you want to restore. You’ll see a yellow and black hazard bar at the top of the interface, which indicates that you are browsing a backup and not actually in the regular Ulysses interface.

You can select the specified backup snapshot you want to browse by selecting it from the drop-down list in the title bar. Then, navigate to the sheet that you want to restore from backup. Right click on the sheet and select the top option to restore it back to your library. You’ll instantly be taken back to the normal Ulysses interface, and the sheet that you restore will be selected and available in your Inbox.

Backup works the same way on iOS, but because the backups are stored locally, Ulysses doesn’t keep as many backups on your iOS device as it does on your Mac for space considerations. On iOS, Ulysses keeps hourly backups for the last six hours of work, daily backups for the last five days of work, and weekly backups for the past two months of work. Backups on iOS can also be a little bit harder to find. Heres what it looks like on the iPhone.

When you open Ulysses, you’ll be taken to your iCloud screen where you can select from the folders and filters to view your available sheets. From here, tap the Library button in the upper left to go to the library screen and then tap the Manage button in the lower right. You’ll see a new backup option appear under the Sources tab, so tap this and you’ll be taken to the list of backups you can choose from on your device.

Just like the Mac, you’ll notice there’s a yellow and black hazard bar to indicate that you are not in the regular Ulysses interface and are instead restoring from a backup. You can select Backup Now on the bottom to create a backup on your device, or you can select one of the backups from the list to navigate to the sheet you want to restore.

Once you find the sheet you want to restore, tap the Select button in the lower right and then tap the circle to check the sheets that you want to restore. Once you’ve selected the sheets you want to restore, tap Restore to Inbox on the bottom of the screen. The sheet will be restored to your Inbox and available to you once you’re done restoring from backup.

Restoring from backup on the iPad works exactly the same way as it does on the iPhone, but once you select the source you’ll be able to see the sheet list and the contents of the sheet as well, thanks to the larger screen. To restore a sheet on your iPad, tap Select on the bottom of the sheet list and select the sheets that you want to restore. Then, tap Restore to Inbox just like on the iPhone.