How to back up a Linear workspace has two answers, and the first one is built in. Linear's own data export lives in Settings, under Administration, behind an admin account, and it gives you a file. It does not give you a schedule, an alert when something goes wrong, or a way back into a workspace.
For a lot of teams that is fine. If Linear holds a side project and two open issues, the manual export is the correct answer and you can stop reading. The teams that need more are the ones where Linear is the plan of record: sprints, roadmap, every decision written down in a comment thread nobody wrote down anywhere else.
We now back up Linear workspaces every day, and this article is the honest version of what that involves: what Linear's own export covers, where it stops, what a scheduled backup captures, and what recovery can and cannot rebuild.
Linear backup and restore is now live in SimpleBackups
Before the guide, the announcement: SimpleBackups now backs up Linear workspaces on a schedule to storage you control, and recovers them into a destination workspace you choose. It is available in Linear's own integration directory.
Here is the walkthrough:
What Linear's native export actually gives you
Linear documents its export in Exporting Data. The path is Settings, then Administration, then Import / Export, then Export data. It is designed for building custom reports and keeping records, and it does that job.
Read it as what it is, though, and four gaps show up:
- It is manual. Nothing runs it on Friday at 03:00 while you are asleep. Somebody has to remember, and the interval between exports is exactly the amount of work you are exposed to losing.
- It is admin-only. The person who notices data is missing is frequently not the person who can produce an export.
- It has no failure signal. A backup you never verified is a backup you are guessing about. A manual export has no run history to check.
- It has no retention. You get a file. Where that file lives, how many versions of it exist, and whether it is encrypted are all now your problem, solved by hand.
None of that makes the export bad. It makes it a snapshot tool rather than a backup system. The distinction matters at the moment you need data back, which is the worst moment to discover it.
Why trust this article
We run Linear backups every day. The failures teams actually hit are rarely dramatic: a project deleted by mistake, an integration or script that bulk-edits hundreds of issues, an offboarding cleanup that removes more than intended. Linear's platform-level backups do not help with any of those, because they exist to recover Linear, not to recover you.
How to back up a Linear workspace: what gets captured
A backup that captures issue titles and nothing else leaves you with a spreadsheet, not a workspace. So the run pulls the entities your teams would need to reconstruct their work:
| Category | Captured |
|---|---|
| Work items | Issues, sub-issues, comments |
| Planning | Projects, milestones, cycles, initiatives |
| Structure | Teams, workflow states, project statuses, labels |
| Content | Documents, templates, custom views |
| People | Users (as records, for assignment matching) |
Attachment and external-link metadata is requested on every run. When you enable Embedded files, SimpleBackups also attempts to download eligible Linear-hosted file bytes.
Each run reports per-entity counts, so you can compare 1,248 issues against what you expect to be there. Anything the run could not capture is listed explicitly rather than skipped quietly. You can also enable a resilient mode that refuses to mark a run as a valid recovery point when part of the core workspace data is missing, which is what stops a half-empty backup from sitting in your history looking healthy.
Archives are compressed JSON Lines, one file per entity type. That matters more than it sounds: your backup is plain structured text, greppable with ordinary tools, readable without our product and without an active Linear subscription.
How recovery works, and what it cannot rebuild
Pick the point-in-time backup you want, connect a destination Linear workspace with write access, and start the recovery from the Restore tab.
Two design decisions are worth naming:
- The credential that reads your data is never the credential that can write to it. The backup connection is read-only OAuth, scoped so it cannot create, modify, or delete anything in the workspace it protects. Recovery uses a second connection you authorize explicitly for the destination.
- Recovery never writes into the workspace you backed up. It recreates content as new teams and records in the destination. The original stays untouched. Use a new, empty workspace where you can.
Recovering into your live workspace is possible, and it is almost never what you want during an incident. A fresh destination workspace lets you confirm what actually came back before anyone works against it, and it keeps the workspace you are trying to rescue out of the blast radius.
Now the part most vendors leave out. These things do not come back:
- People. SimpleBackups does not create users or recreate workspace and team memberships. Existing people are matched by email for assignments and project memberships.
- Templates, custom views, and project-status settings. These are not recreated, though a project can reuse a destination status with the same name or type.
- Embedded file bytes. Downloaded files are not re-uploaded yet. Attachments keep their original links, and Linear-hosted source URLs may not resolve in the destination.
What does come back: issues, sub-issue and project relationships, comments, labels, and workflow states. Progress is visible while the recovery runs, and an interrupted restore resumes from where it stopped instead of starting over.
We would rather you read that list now than find it at restore time.
Encryption, and who holds the key
Your archive is encrypted with AES-256 as it streams, so an unencrypted copy is never written anywhere. You choose how you hold the key: bring one generated on your end, or generate a passphrase and have the key derived from it at backup time. Either way, the key never reaches our servers.
The consequence is exactly what you would want, and exactly what you should think about before your first run. What lands in your storage can only be opened by you: not by your storage provider, and not by us. It also cannot be reissued by anyone. Lose the key and the archive is gone. Store it somewhere safe first.
Destination is your call too: your own storage provider or SimpleStorage, with region selection when data residency is a requirement.
Where compliance comes in
"Do you hold an independent, restorable copy of the data in your project-tracking system?" is a question auditors ask, and Linear's platform-level backups are not an answer to it. They live with the vendor, you cannot restore from them, and you cannot produce evidence that they ran.
Three things typically close that gap:
- An off-site copy under your control, in a region you chose, held separately from the SaaS vendor.
- Evidence the backups ran. Run history with per-entity counts is the difference between asserting a control and demonstrating one.
- Encryption with a key you hold, which is what makes "the data is ours" a technical statement instead of a contractual one.
Which direction the obligation runs
A framework does not ask whether Linear backs up its own platform. It asks whether you can produce a recoverable copy of the data you put there, and evidence that recovery works. That obligation is yours. "Linear handles it" is not an answer an auditor accepts.
If your company carries SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA obligations, those frameworks expect you to identify the systems holding operational data, protect them with backups, and demonstrate recovery. Linear becomes one of those systems the moment your roadmap, incident history, and customer-reported issues live in it.
That is why most teams arrive here: not because we hold a certificate, but because they hold one and need a control they can evidence. It helps that SimpleBackups is itself ISO 27001 certified and audited annually, is based in Belgium and GDPR-aligned, and lets you pick your storage region including EU-only options. Working with a certified provider shortens your own audit. It does not transfer the obligation.
We wrote up the same reasoning for source control in GitHub vs compliance, and the argument transfers cleanly to the system where your roadmap lives.
Where to start tonight
Connect your Linear workspace with read-only access, set a daily schedule, pick a destination you control, enable encryption, and store the key somewhere that is not the workspace you just backed up. Then do the step almost nobody does: run one recovery into a throwaway workspace and look at what came back. Twenty minutes now, against a very bad afternoon later.
If you would rather not build and babysit that yourself, SimpleBackups backs up Linear on a schedule, to storage you own, with run reports that tell you what each backup actually captured.
Keep learning
- How to set up SaaS backups, the practical setup pattern once you are protecting more than one tool.
- Disaster recovery plan testing and backup metrics, for the step in this article almost nobody actually does: proving the restore works.
- Linear backup documentation, for the setup detail and the current recovery limitations.
FAQ
Does Linear back up my workspace already?
Linear runs infrastructure-level backups so it can recover its own platform from an outage or hardware failure. Those are not a customer-facing feature. You cannot browse them, choose a point in time, or recover your workspace from them yourself. They protect Linear's platform, not your workspace against your own team's mistakes.
How do I export data from Linear?
Open Settings, go to Administration, then Import / Export, and choose Export data at the bottom of the page. The export is manual, it requires admin access, and it produces a file you download. There is no schedule, no failure alert, and no retention window. It is a point-in-time snapshot you have to remember to take.
What can't be recovered back into Linear?
People are not created and workspace or team memberships are not recreated; existing people are matched by email for assignments and project memberships. Templates, custom views, and project-status settings are not recreated, although a project can reuse a destination status with the same name or type. Downloaded embedded-file bytes are not re-uploaded yet, so attachments keep their original links and Linear-hosted source URLs may not resolve in the destination workspace.
Can I read a Linear backup without SimpleBackups?
Yes. Each run is a compressed archive of JSON Lines files, one per entity type, so it is plain structured text you can grep, load into a script, or pipe into another system. Internal IDs and relationships are preserved, so the links between issues, projects, and comments stay intact. Reading your own backup needs neither a SimpleBackups account nor an active Linear subscription.
How often should I back up a Linear workspace?
Your backup interval should be shorter than the amount of work you are willing to lose between runs. For a team filing and closing issues every day, daily is the right starting point. If your workspace drives sprint planning for several teams, or an auditor expects documented recovery points, every 6 to 12 hours is more appropriate.