Automated Linear backup, ready to recover.

Linear runs infrastructure-level backups to 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. That leaves the failures teams actually hit uncovered, and they are rarely dramatic ones: a project deleted by mistake, an integration or script that bulk-edits hundreds of issues, an offboarding cleanup that removes more than intended. An independent backup is a copy you hold, on a schedule you set, that you can recover from without filing a support ticket and waiting.

Issues and sub-issues, comments, projects and milestones, cycles, workflow states, teams, users, labels, documents, initiatives, templates, custom views, and project statuses. Attachment and external-link metadata is requested on every run. When Embedded files is enabled, SimpleBackups also attempts to download eligible Linear-hosted file bytes; those best-effort downloads can fail without failing the whole backup.

Through a read-only OAuth connection. The backup connection is scoped so it cannot create, modify, or delete anything in your Linear workspace, and its tokens are encrypted at rest. Recovery is deliberately separate: it uses a second connection that you authorize explicitly for a destination workspace, so the credential that reads your data is never the credential that can write to it.

Not once you enable encryption. Your archive is encrypted with AES-256 as it streams, using either a key you generate on your end or a passphrase you choose, and that key is never stored on our side. What lands in your storage can only be opened by you: not by your storage provider, and not by us. The tradeoff is worth stating plainly, because a key only you hold cannot be reissued by anyone: lose it and the archive cannot be recovered. Store it somewhere safe before your first run.

You choose the destination: your own storage provider or SimpleStorage. Each run is a compressed archive of JSON Lines (JSONL) files, one per entity type, so it is plain structured text you can grep, load into a script, or pipe into another system with ordinary tools. Internal IDs and relationships are preserved, so the links between issues, projects, and comments stay intact. Reading your own backup requires neither a SimpleBackups account nor an active Linear subscription.

Every run reports per-entity counts, so you can see how many issues, comments, projects, and documents were captured and compare that against what you expect to be there. Anything the run could not capture is listed explicitly instead of being 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 an incomplete backup from sitting in your history looking like a good one.

Pick the point-in-time backup you want, connect a destination Linear workspace with write access, then start the recovery from the Restore tab. SimpleBackups recreates the backed-up content as new teams and records in the destination workspace; it never writes to or overwrites the workspace you backed up. Progress is visible while it runs, and an interrupted restore resumes from where it stopped rather than starting over.

Use a new, empty destination workspace whenever you can. SimpleBackups does not create people or recreate workspace and team memberships; 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 use an existing destination status with the same name or type. Downloaded embedded-file bytes are not re-uploaded yet: attachments keep their original links, and Linear-hosted source URLs may not work in the destination. Issues, sub-issue and project relationships, comments, labels, and workflow states are recreated.

Pricing is based on the number of active Linear members protected by your backup. Lite includes 25 members, Plus includes 100, and Max includes unlimited members. On the free Basic plan, the $10/month Linear addon protects up to 5 members. Extra capacity beyond your plan's allowance is $10/month per additional 5 members.

Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, no credit card required. See our pricing page for the full comparison.