There are five ways to keep a copy of an Airtable base: Airtable's own snapshots, the trash and revision history, CSV downloads, your own script, and a backup service. They protect against different things. A snapshot undoes a bad import. Only a copy outside Airtable helps if you lose access to the workspace, a sync deletes data you didn't notice for months, or you need the files somewhere you control.
The short answer
- Undo a recent mistake: use the base's trash (7 days) or a snapshot. Both are built in and free.
- Keep a copy outside Airtable: export it. By hand, that means one CSV per table plus downloading every attachment separately, because CSV files only contain temporary links to the files.
- Keep that outside copy up to date without thinking about it: use a backup service that runs on a schedule and saves the attachment files themselves.
What Airtable already keeps
Airtable has three recovery features. All of them live inside Airtable, so they depend on your account, your workspace and your plan.
| Feature | What it covers | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Base trash | Deleted records, fields, tables, views and extensions | 7 days |
| Workspace trash | Deleted bases and workspaces | 30 days (up to 180 on Enterprise Scale) |
| Record revision history | Earlier cell values on each record | Free 2 weeks, Team 1 year, Business 2 years |
| Snapshots | The whole base at a point in time | Free 2 weeks, Team 1 year, Business 2 years, Enterprise Scale 3 years |
Snapshots are the closest thing to a built-in backup. Airtable takes them automatically, more often for bases you use heavily, and you can take one by hand before a big change. Restoring a snapshot creates a new base next to the original; it doesn't roll the original back. The snapshots guide covers the details.
What snapshots can't do is leave Airtable. You can't download one, open it in a spreadsheet or keep it in your own storage. If the workspace is deleted, the account is locked, or someone with access removes the base and its trash expires, the snapshots go with it.
Option 1: download CSV files
Every grid view has Download CSV in its menu. It's free and needs no setup.
- It exports one view of one table. A base with 12 tables needs 12 downloads.
- Only the fields visible in that view are included, and the view's filters apply. Use an unfiltered view with every field shown.
- Attachment fields become a file name and a link. Airtable says those links expire after a few hours, so the CSV doesn't contain your files.
- Linked records appear as the primary field text of the linked record, not as IDs, which makes rebuilding the links harder.
CSV downloads work for a one-off copy of a small base without attachments. The export guide walks through doing it properly.
Option 2: download the attachments too
Airtable has no button that downloads every attachment in a base. You can download files one at a time from an expanded record, use a Marketplace extension, or run the script from Airtable's support article, which prints download commands for a table or view. The links those methods use also expire, so the download has to happen soon after the export. See how to download all attachments.
Option 3: write a script
The Airtable Web API returns records 100 at a time, with record IDs, field IDs and links between records. A script can fetch every table, save JSON, and download each attachment while its link is still valid.
That's a reasonable project for a developer, but a script that backs up correctly has to:
- page through every table and retry when Airtable answers with a rate limit (5 requests per second per base);
- download attachments within a couple of hours of reading the records;
- avoid saving the same unchanged file every day;
- check that the files it wrote are complete;
- run on a schedule and tell someone when it fails.
The last point is where home-made backups usually break: they stop quietly when a token expires and nobody notices until they need the copy. Check your Airtable plan's API call allowance too, because Free workspaces get 1,000 calls a month.
Option 4: use a backup service
A backup service does the script's job on a schedule. They differ in four ways that matter more than the price:
- Where the copy lives. Some store it on their own servers; others write to your Google Drive, Dropbox or S3 bucket.
- Whether attachments are saved as files. A backup that only keeps attachment links loses the files when those links expire.
- How often it runs and how long it keeps history.
- How you get data back. Some restore into Airtable for you; others give you files to import.
The backup tools comparison lists what On2Air, ProBackup, Airhistory and KeepMyBase each offer.
Which one should you use?
| Situation | Use |
|---|---|
| You deleted something in the last week | Base trash |
| A bad import or automation changed many records | Snapshot taken before it, or revision history for a few records |
| You need a copy for an audit or before leaving Airtable | CSV export plus attachment download |
| The base runs part of your business | A scheduled backup outside Airtable, and keep using snapshots |
Snapshots and an outside backup aren't alternatives. Snapshots are the fastest way to undo a mistake; an outside copy is what you have when Airtable itself isn't available to you.
What no backup includes
Airtable's API doesn't expose interfaces, automations, extensions' settings or exact view configuration, so no backup tool that uses the API can save them. Write down your automations and keep screenshots of important interfaces separately. Record comments and revision history are available to some tools and not others; check before you rely on them.