How to Back Up and Restore Your CPAP History

Why Your CPAP History Can Vanish

CPAP Clarity keeps your imported data entirely in your browser. That is what makes it private. It also means the data is only as durable as the browser. Clear your cookies, switch computers, reinstall Chrome, or wait long enough for iOS Safari to evict an unused site's storage, and the months of nightly sessions you have carefully imported are gone.

Your SD card is the ultimate source of truth, so you can always re-import from scratch. But if your card was ever out of your machine, if you rely on manual nights, or if you just do not want to re-process a year of data every time you touch your browser settings, a local backup is the answer.

This guide walks through CPAP Clarity's backup and restore feature. It lives on the Data page and never touches a server we control.

What the Backup File Contains

A CPAP Clarity backup is a single .zip file. When you restore it, every one of these items comes back:

• Every imported session with its full time-series data, event annotations, and CSR episodes
• Every manual night you have marked (travel CPAP, forgotten SD card, etc.)
• Your machine settings (model, therapy mode, pressure, mask, humidity)
• The last-backup timestamp so the backup nudge stays accurate

What the backup does not contain:

• Your SD card itself. Keep that. It remains the authoritative source for data CPAP Clarity has not imported yet.
• Any data from our servers. There are no servers involved in backup or restore.
• PII. Only your therapy numbers and your device's identification fields are inside the zip.

The whole file usually ranges from a few megabytes for a light user to 50-100 MB for someone with a year or more of nightly imports.

Step 1: Open the Data Page

Click Data in the top navigation from anywhere on cpapclarity.com. The Data page shows your medical disclaimer, the backup card, a manual-nights section, storage usage, and (in a collapsed Advanced accordion) the destructive controls like Clear All Data.

If you are brand new and have not imported any sessions yet, the backup card still loads. Every other section waits for your first import.

Step 2: Download a Backup

Click Download Backup on the backup card. Your browser creates a zip in your usual downloads folder named something like cpap-clarity-backup-2026-04-16.zip.

On mobile browsers with more than 100 MB of therapy data stored, you may see a Large backup on mobile dialog recommending a desktop browser for the export. Mobile browsers have stricter memory limits; desktop handles a full-year export more reliably.

After a successful download, the card's "Last backup" label updates to "today," and the amber nudge (which appears whenever it has been more than 30 days since your last backup) turns back to its normal teal.

Step 3: Save the Backup Somewhere Safe

Move the zip off your local downloads folder into a place that survives a reinstall. None of these options go through CPAP Clarity's servers. You upload the file yourself to a provider you already trust.

iCloud Drive (Mac, iPhone, iPad)

1. Open Finder (Mac) or the Files app (iOS).
2. Navigate to iCloud Drive and pick a folder, or create one like "CPAP Backups."
3. Drag the zip from Downloads into that folder.

On iOS, Apple encrypts files in iCloud Drive with standard account encryption. Enabling Advanced Data Protection in Settings > Apple ID > iCloud gives the zip end-to-end encryption where only your devices can read it, at the cost of losing iCloud web access. Your call based on convenience vs strictness.

Google Drive

1. Open drive.google.com (opens in new tab) or the Google Drive app.
2. Click New > File upload (or tap the + icon on mobile) and pick the zip.
3. Drop it into a folder like "CPAP Backups" so it is easy to find later.

Google Drive encrypts in transit and at rest, and the file is invisible to other users unless you explicitly share it. Treat sharing the same way you would a doctor's-visit PDF: do not.

OneDrive

1. Open the OneDrive app or onedrive.live.com (opens in new tab).
2. Click Upload > Files and select the zip.
3. If you use OneDrive's Personal Vault, drop it there. That folder adds an extra identity check (PIN, face, fingerprint) before the file can be read, which is a nice fit for health data.

Dropbox

1. Open the Dropbox app or dropbox.com (opens in new tab).
2. Use Upload files and pick the zip.
3. Consider a dedicated folder like "/Health/CPAP" with Dropbox's Smart Sync set to online-only so the file does not cost local disk on every device.

External SSD or USB drive (all platforms)

A small USB-C portable SSD (opens in new tab) costs under $40 and keeps a copy entirely offline. This is the strongest backup strategy: a provider outage, a locked account, or a cloud policy change cannot touch it. Pair it with a cloud copy for the 3-2-1 pattern.

NAS or home server (advanced)

If you run a Synology, QNAP, or a home Linux box, drop the zip into the same share where you keep important documents. Anything that gets your nightly duplicity or rsync backup already covers it.

Naming convention

Rename the file with a date prefix if you want to keep multiple generations (for example, 2026-04-cpap-clarity-backup.zip). CPAP Clarity ignores the filename when you restore, so rename freely. A dated series like 2026-02, 2026-03, 2026-04 gives you rollback targets if something ever looks wrong in the latest restore.

Step 4: Restore the Backup

Restoring works on any browser that can run CPAP Clarity. Open cpapclarity.com/data on the target browser (the same one, a different one, or a different computer entirely). Click Restore from Backup and pick the zip.

Every table in IndexedDB is replaced atomically inside a single transaction. A crash, a refresh, or a closed tab during restore rolls everything back, so you never end up with half of a backup loaded.

If the target browser already has sessions in it, restore merges additively by startTime. Identical nights are updated in place. Nights that are unique to either side are kept. Nothing is silently overwritten.

Step 5: Handle the Different-Device Case

If the backup was taken from a different CPAP than the one your current browser knows about, CPAP Clarity pauses and shows a Different CPAP detected dialog. It names both devices (current and backup) and asks you to confirm.

This is the guardrail that prevents a devastating mistake: restoring a friend's backup into your own browser, or a loaner machine's export over your main machine's history. Clicking Replace data clears the current browser's sessions and replaces them with the backup's. Clicking Cancel aborts without touching anything.

The dialog is the same one the SD-card import flow uses when you switch machines. Both paths emit the same telemetry so we can see how often this guardrail is actually doing its job.

Step 6: Trust the Stale-Parse Banner

If you restore a backup that was created with an older version of CPAP Clarity's parser, the restored sessions keep their original parser version instead of being silently upgraded. The dashboard shows a small amber banner prompting you to re-import your SD card, because the newer parser may extract data the older one missed.

You can ignore the banner and use the restored data as-is. The banner is informational, not a hard block. It just means: "the numbers below reflect the parser from your original import, not the latest one."

How Often Should I Back Up?

The backup card turns amber after 30 days. That is a reasonable cadence for most users: monthly, paired with your normal SD-card import. If you never change therapy settings and import rarely, 90 days is fine. If you are tuning your therapy aggressively, back up after every import so you can roll back to a known-good state.

No account, no cloud, no cost. Back up as often as you want.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is my backup encrypted? The zip itself is not encrypted. If you need encryption, put the zip inside an encrypted cloud drive (iCloud, OneDrive), or use 7-Zip's AES-256 option (opens in new tab) to repackage it with a password. CPAP data is generally less sensitive than medical records (it has your device model and nightly AHI, but no name, address, or diagnosis), but your risk tolerance is your call.

Can I open the zip and look inside? Yes. The zip contains a manifest.json, a sessions.json, and per-session time-series binary files. Everything inside is inspectable. If you know how to read an EDF+ file, you can verify CPAP Clarity is storing what it claims to be storing.

What if I restore onto a computer that already has data? Restore merges additively. If a night exists in both places, the backup's copy wins for that night. If a night is only in the backup, it is added. If a night is only in your current browser, it is preserved. You never lose data unless you hit the different-device replace path above.

Can I back up just the last 30 days? Not currently. Backups are always the full history in the browser. If that matters to you, file feedback.

What about the machine settings and manual nights? Both are included. Restoring brings back your last-imported machine settings and every manual night you have marked. If you have a rolling collection of machine settings from different imports, only the most recent is stored, matching how CPAP Clarity uses settings elsewhere.

Your History, Your Copies

The point of local backup is not to escape CPAP Clarity. It is to make sure your history survives anything your browser might do to it. A 10-second download, stored somewhere you control, and your year of therapy data becomes something you can restore on any machine, in any browser, forever.

Open the Data page to back up now →

For the privacy story behind this design, see CPAP Data Privacy. For the full feature tour of CPAP Clarity, see How to Use CPAP Clarity.