The nightly snapshot is the quietest part of Context. It runs every night, the restore history is visible, and there is a recovery path onto a clean device. All three sentences are true, and together they still do not add up to “you have a backup”.
The loss a snapshot covers
Data goes missing from a workspace in three ways. You delete the wrong thing. An edit leaves a page in a state you did not intend. Or a file corrupts and won’t open.
A snapshot covers all three, because in all three the device is still sitting there. You restore yesterday, you lose ten minutes of work, you carry on. The visible restore history is the part that matters here: restoring without knowing which date you are returning to is how people turn a small loss into a larger one.
The loss it does not cover
There is a fourth kind of loss: the device itself. Stolen, dropped, dead drive, a glass of water.
The nightly snapshot lives on that same machine, so in the fourth case the snapshot goes too. That is not a flaw so much as the direct bill for a design decision. Sync ships switched off, nothing leaves on its own, and data that never leaves the device is also data that leaves with the device. Two faces of one choice.
How far “recovery onto a clean device” goes
The recovery path stands up your workspace on a new machine when you have a snapshot file. The condition hides in the first half of that sentence: when you have a snapshot file.
Unless you copied it somewhere, that file is on the old machine’s disk. Recovery on the new machine means putting back something you could get out of the old one. If the drive won’t read, there is nothing to put back.
Where a backup starts
Backups have one rule and it isn’t a technical one: the copy must not share the fate of the thing it protects. A snapshot on the same disk, an external drive in the same bag, two computers in the same flat. One event takes all three.
In Context the practical answer is the Markdown export. You pull the workspace out as plain text; the file is yours and stays readable even if the app is gone. The vault can be exported separately. The moment that file sits somewhere other than this machine, you have a backup.
How the two divide the work
The snapshot and the export do different jobs, which is why both exist:
- The nightly snapshot guards against your own mistakes. Daily, automatic, same device.
- The Markdown export guards against the device. Manual, occasional, somewhere else.
Don’t stretch “occasional” too far. A monthly export means a month of work in the worst case; pick the interval knowing your own pace. Turning sync on gives you a second copy, but sync was never designed as a backup feature: delete something on one device and it goes on the other one too.
The answer to “do I have a backup” does not live in whether the snapshot ran. It lives in when you last put a file somewhere outside this machine.