Backing up and moving to a new Mac

TimeBill has no cloud sync and no automatic backup. Your data lives only on your Mac. The built-in way to back up or move your work is the JSON Project Export, plus a few extra steps for the things the export deliberately leaves out.

What the JSON export includes (and what it doesn't)

Export All Projects writes a versioned JSON file containing every project with its tasks, time entries, cost items, deadlines, priorities, and billing states (including billed/paid dates).

It does not include:

• Customer records: only an internal customer reference is exported.
• The Invoice Vault: archived invoice PDFs and XMLs are never part of the project export.
• Your company, payment, and e-invoicing details: these live in the Your Details sheet, not in projects.
• Custom invoice templates: these have their own .timebilltemplate export.
• Your Premium purchase: that is tied to your App Store account, not to your data.

Creating a backup

1. Stop any running timers. A still-running timer is exported with the current time as its end time.
2. Choose File > Export > Project Export > Export All Projects.
3. Save the file (suggested name projects.json) somewhere safe, ideally on an external drive or in a cloud folder.

The export is a snapshot, not a live backup, so repeat it regularly.

Moving to a new Mac

1. Install TimeBill on the new Mac (macOS 14.6 or later). On the App Store build, restore your Premium purchase by opening View > Upgrade to Premium... and clicking Restore Purchase at the bottom of the sheet; Setapp users get full access automatically.
2. Recreate your customers in the Customer Management window (View > Customer Management, Shift-Cmd-M). The export stores only an internal customer reference, and a recreated customer counts as a new record, so on a new Mac imported projects arrive without their customer. After importing, assign the right customer to each project again in its project detail view.
3. Choose File > Import Project... and select your .json file. Grant access in the file dialog; denying it results in a "Permission denied to access the file" error.
4. Re-enter your company, e-invoicing, and bank details in Your Details (bottom of the sidebar).
5. Move custom invoice templates by exporting each as a .timebilltemplate file and double-clicking it on the new Mac.
6. For your old invoices, use the Invoice Vault's bulk export on the old Mac to save the PDFs into a folder. Vault documents cannot be re-imported into TimeBill, so keep that folder as your archive.

Things to watch out for

• Double-clicking projects.json in Finder imports nothing. TimeBill opens, but you must use File > Import Project....
• Duplicates are skipped, never merged. Projects that already exist on the destination Mac are reported with "was skipped because it already exists" in an Import Error message; the rest import normally.
• "Unsupported export version" means the file was created by a newer TimeBill. Update the app on the destination Mac first.

If anything goes wrong mid-move, contact us via Help > Contact Support or the contact form.