My old budget app crashed and I lost a whole month of tracking

I was using this free app called Pennywise for three years, and it just stopped opening on my phone last Tuesday. I spent about six hours trying to get it to work, even looking up old forum fixes, before I had to accept all my April data was gone. Had to start fresh with a new system and manually rebuild everything from bank statements. Anyone else have a budgeting tool just die on them like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

wendy_murphy164mo ago

Remember how they always say to print your photos because digital isn't forever. Your budget data is the same. I got burned years ago and now I do a weekly screenshot of my main budget screen and save it to a folder. Takes two seconds. It's not a full backup but it gives you a visual record of your numbers and categories if the whole thing goes down. Lets you rebuild way faster than starting from zero with bank statements.

murray.betty4mo ago

I always figured the auto-backup on my budgeting app was enough. Wendy's point about having a visual snapshot to rebuild from is really smart though. It would save hours of digging through old bank PDFs if the app ever lost my data. I'm going to start doing those weekly screenshots too.

lily892mo ago

Tbh wendy_murphy16 nailed it with that photo comparison, that's exactly how I see it now. I lost everything from a whole tax season once and had to manually match receipts with bank statements for like three weekends straight. @murray.betty you're totally right about the visual snapshot thing, I started doing monthly screenshots after that disaster and it saved me last year when my new app did a weird sync error. I even take a quick picture of my receipt piles once a week just in case, it's dumb but it works. Honestly the time investment is nothing compared to rebuilding from scratch.