Using Your App

Back up and download your data

Your data is yours — the account owner can create a complete, verified copy of it at any time. It is never trapped here.

A promise this application makes plainly: your data is yours, and it is not held hostage. The account owner can create an independent, complete, verified copy of the account's data at any time, for any reason — a scheduled backup habit, a compliance requirement, or simply because owning your data means being able to hold it in your hands.

Who can do it

Only the account owner. The download control appears in account settings for the owner alone — and more importantly, the restriction is enforced on the server for every step of the process, not just by hiding a button. The system confirms, from the signed-in identity itself, that the requester is the active owner of this specific account before anything is prepared or released. No one can request it on the owner's behalf, and nothing in the request can point it at a different account, because the request doesn't carry an account at all — the server already knows whose data the owner owns.

What you receive

One archive, named with your account and a timestamp, containing:

• Your database — every record across the whole account: your core business data, your AI data (including what the AI has generated for you), your operational data, and your history and logs.
• Your files — documents, images, and attachments, organized in folders.
• A manifest — a machine-readable inventory of what the archive contains and when it was made.
• Checksums — a fingerprint for every file, so you (or your IT team, or an auditor) can verify the archive is complete and untampered, today or years from now.

Data export and application export are separate

The routine archive described on this page is the data export: portable customer tables, values, files, AI data, operational history, and audit history. Builders can separately export the application's versioned JSON and JSON Schema definitions for pages and workflows. Keeping these packages separate makes it possible to back up customer data frequently without placing platform runtime code or credentials into every routine archive.

No secrets travel in either export. Password hashes, API keys, tokens, and other credential-bearing values are stripped or represented only by non-secret references. Credentials must be re-established in the destination environment during a migration or continuity restoration.

Send backups to storage you control

Customers can also configure customer-owned Amazon S3 storage for restore bundles containing the database, files, schemas, settings, manifest, and checksums. The customer controls the bucket, access rules, retention, versioning, and optional Object Lock. This provides a backup copy that does not depend on BuildWithHQ remaining the only holder of the files.

Use the export to leave or rebuild

You can use an export as a verified backup, import the data into your own reporting or replacement system, or use it with the application-definition export and continuity runtime to restore the application outside BuildWithHQ. Because each customer has an isolated database, restoration is performed for that customer without separating their records from a shared customer-data database. Read Business continuity and application portability.

Why this matters

Most software makes data export an off-boarding concession — something you fight for on the way out. Here it's a standing feature of being a customer: exercisable anytime, by you, without asking permission or opening a ticket. Data ownership you can't exercise isn't ownership; this is the exercising. It pairs with the warehouse sync — continuous flow of your history into your own analytics infrastructure — as the two halves of the same promise: a copy you can hold, and a stream you can build on.

Capability review: 2026-09-14. For exact current technical availability, use the generated API Map and first-class module inventory.