Trello has become a mission control center for millions of products in every possible industry. After all, it’s so easy to plan projects and execute them with the help of Atlassian’s product. It’s also not hard at all to run a Trello backup process – manually or automatically.
This guide will explain different approaches and share plenty of tips for exporting Trello data to safe locations.
Trello backup – Why and How?
Trello is a very reliable platform. There’s little reason to expect this to change, but a good practice would suggest making regular backups anyway.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a major outage or a loss of data. It could be a human error that accidentally wipes out entire boards or alters numerous cards beyond repair. If that happens, you’ll want to have a fresh backup in place.
Exporting Trello data to a spreadsheet or a data warehouse is also a valid use case. This way, you can track your KPIs, estimate workload, or have an accessible overview of what everyone’s working on right now.
There are two ways to back up Trello: manual and automated data export. We’ll explore both approaches in the following chapters.
Automatic Trello backup using Coupler.io
An alternative approach to backup Trello would be an external service capable of fetching backups automatically on a chosen schedule. There are quite a few scripts and services suitable for doing that to some extent. One of the simplest and, at the same time, complete solution is Coupler.io.
It’s a reporting automation platform that lets you connect 60+ apps to spreadsheets, data warehouses, and BI tools. Let’s see how you can back up Trello and schedule a refresh using Coupler.io
Select a destination app in the form below and click Proceed. You’ll be offered to create a Coupler.io account for free to get started.
1. Collect Trello data
Connect and authorize your Trello account. Then choose one of the three types of data entities for export:
- Board cards
- Card updates
- Checklist items
You’ll also need to enter a board URL.
2. Transform and organize data
In the next step, you can preview and transform your Trello data before exporting it:
- Hide, rename, edit, reorder columns
- Add custom columns using formulas
- Filter and sort data
- Blend data from multiple Trello accounts or even other apps.
After that, connect your destination app account and specify where to load your Trello backup copy. For instance, if you set up a Trello to Google Sheets integration, you’ll need to specify a spreadsheet and a sheet for your backup copy.
3. Schedule data refresh
The last step is to enable Automatic data refresh and configure the schedule. This way you will automate your backups.
How to back up a Trello board with Coupler.io?
If you wish to back up an entire board, pick Board cards as a Data entity.
You’ll need to enter a Board URL in the next stage – a unique address of a board you wish to fetch. To get it, open the menu, click on More, and copy a link visible to the bottom of the list.
Then proceed with the importer setup as described above.
If there are more boards you wish to back up, have no fear – you won’t have to repeat the entire process. For each different board, copy the existing importer.
Then, swap only the Board URL and change the destination. You may also want to name the importer accordingly.
How to back up Trello cards using Coupler.io?
When you create a backup for Trello, the app will fetch all cards present on it. If this is your goal, follow the previous chapter. For each card, you’ll get the basic details such as:
- Its name
- ID
- Description
- Status
- Assignee
- Position
- List it’s on
- Position
If you need to dig deeper into what happens on your board, you may also be interested in pulling the updates to cards from a chosen period. For this, create a new importer or edit an existing one: this time, select Cards updates as a Data entity.
While you’re at it, it may be worth specifying the Start date field. If you don’t, all the historical updates to cards for a chosen board will be pulled, which could quickly amount to thousands for old boards.
More likely, you’re interested in just the recent updates. You could enter a specific date, but a more helpful thing would be a macro, indicating that, for example, Trello should pull only the changes made in the last seven days:
See our guide to supported macros for some more examples.
Adjust the destination if needed and run the importer.
How to back up Trello manually?
Let’s look at two arguably most common things you may want to back up – an entire Trello board and a single Trello card.
Trello board backup
Trello has a native method for exporting boards and particular cards. To find it, enter the desired board and pull up the menu to the right. Here, select More and then Print and export.
Printing a board isn’t of interest to us at this point but the other two options certainly are.
Export to JSON file is available for all Trello users. However, export to a more accessible CSV file is limited only to Trello’s Business Class users.
Although you can extract the needed information from a JSON file, they’re not very readable at first. Here’s a quick look at an example JSON file containing a backup of our Trello board:
Not very readable, huh? JSON files are more suitable for applications that can quickly parse them and display their contents in a much better form.
Those of you capable of retrieving a CSV file will be in a much better position – CSVs can easily be imported into Excel, Google Sheets, and lots of other services.
Trello card backup
If you’re not interested in an entire board but would instead export just a card, you do it a bit differently. Open the card, click the Share button and then Export JSON. CSV export is not available for cards, unfortunately.
That’s just about everything on the manual Trello data backup. It can be pretty limiting if you’re on the free plan. But the main disadvantage of a manual mode is that, well, it’s manual.
The thing about backups is that you want to do them regularly, ideally as often as daily. If you create a Trello backup only now and then, your data will inevitably be outdated. You could make it a habit to, for example, wrap up every week with a backup. But if Trello could automate this tedious process, we would say it’s worth at least exploring.
How can I back up my Trello tasks?
Suppose you’re only interested in cards assigned to yourself or any other person. You can get this information via Trello API using Coupler.io. This approach requires more tech-savviness but is still easy to set up, with no coding involved.
Select the needed destination in the form below and click Proceed. As an example, you can set up a JSON to Google Sheets importer.
As a JSON URL, enter the following string:
https://api.trello.com/1/members/{member_id}/cards
How to find member_ID?
To complete the URL, we need to find a {member_id} of a user in question – it could be yourself or any other person present on your boards.
You won’t find this number in your profile. You’ll retrieve it by typing the following URL:
https://api.trello.com/1/members/{username}
Replace {username} with a user’s Trello username. For example, for a user nicknamed elon_musk, the URL would be
https://api.trello.com/1/members/elon_musk
Type this URL into a browser. A JSON formatted text will load, from which you’ll need to copy the ID.
All in all, the JSON URL for our importer will be, for example:
https://api.trello.com/1/members/5ceca60500b9a77164778893/cards
Enter it in the JSON URL field in Coupler.io:
Then you need to specify the URL query parameters: your API key and token:
key: {api_key}
token: {server_token}
To get the {api_key}, visit https://trello.com/app-key and copy it from the top of the page.
To get the {server_token}, click the Token link below and authorize the application. Then, copy your token.
Insert both values in your importer’s settings.
Complete the importer setup and run it. As a result, you’ll get all the cards for a given user.
Depending on how actively you use Trello, the importer may bring hundreds or even thousands of cards into your spreadsheet. It will fetch everything you’re set to work on, all things in progress, as well as all sorts of finished tasks you’ve long forgotten. It’s because you’re probably still assigned to them, and that’s all that matters to Trello API.
Shall I back up Trello on a schedule?
The manual Trello backup is not a time-efficient activity. Moreover, with your growing projects, the volume of data will grow as well. This means that you will spend more time updating your backup copy.
On the other hand, you can delegate this to Coupler.io. With a few clicks, you can set up an importer that will refresh your backup copy every day or more frequently. In addition, you will benefit from Coupler.io for other reporting tasks since it supports more than 60 apps that you can connect to spreadsheets, data warehouses, and BI tools.
Check out the Trello to BigQuery integration and our guide on Trello reporting.
Give Coupler.io a try and see how it works for you!
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