A month's backup is downloadable for 30 days, and then it's gone from the page. The months you missed aren't lost — our Tech Team can build them again, and this is how to ask.
Introduction
Every month, Pipeline generates a downloadable copy of your account and holds it on the Monthly Backups page for 30 days. Offices that download them every month never think about this article. Everyone else has gaps: the year someone was out, the stretch when the office changed hands, the whole decade nobody knew the page existed.
Those months can be re-generated. It's manual work on our side rather than a button on yours, so it's a request with a fee attached, and it comes with two rules worth knowing before you start: it has to come from your master admin, and what we build lands back in your account on a fresh 30-day clock.
When to Use This
- You went to download a backup and the month you wanted isn't on the page anymore.
- An auditor, an attorney, or your accountant has named a period that reaches back further than your saved files do.
- You're closing the account and want a complete offline set before you go.
- You need hundreds of transactions offline and downloading them one at a time keeps hitting the daily limit.
- Your office has been on Pipeline for years and nobody is sure which backups were ever saved.
Not sure what's already on your drive? Check before you order. Only the months that are genuinely missing need re-generating, and the current month is always on the page for free.
Why This Beats Downloading Transactions One at a Time
When someone needs a few hundred transactions offline, the instinct is to work down the Transactions list and download each one. It's a reasonable instinct and it stalls quickly: preparing a transaction for download is heavy work on our servers, so each account has a daily ceiling on how many it can pull. The ceiling moves with server load and your plan, so there's no number to plan around — you get told to try again tomorrow, part-way through.
A monthly backup is the same documents delivered in one file, already sorted into a folder per property. Ordering the months you're missing turns a three-week download project into a handful of ZIPs, and it costs less than the fortnight of somebody's afternoons.
1. List the Exact Months You're Missing
Start from a list of the months your records need to cover, not from memory of which ones somebody grabbed. Open the folder where your office keeps them, tick off what's there, and write down the holes as month and year.
Send them all at once. It's quicker to fill several gaps in a single order than to come back to us three times, and it lets us look at the whole request when we price it — a long list is cheaper per backup than a short one.
Every month, Pipeline builds a downloadable copy of your account so you always have an offline record of your transactions and documents — yours to keep, whether you're just being cautious or planning ahead.
See Monthly Backups
Worth knowing before you decide which months you need: a backup holds the transactions created in that month plus the ones that closed, expired, or fell through in it. So a deal that opened in March and closed in September appears in both — and if you're chasing one particular file, the month it closed is usually the one to ask for.
2. Send the Request From the Master Admin Address
Email us with the list, and send it from the master admin's email address on the account. We verify who's asking before re-generating anything — a full account backup is the whole company's paperwork in one file, so it isn't something we'll build on an unverified request.
If your master admin can't email from that address for some reason, there's an equivalent: have them submit the request from inside their own Pipeline profile, which verifies them the same way.
Need a hand? The quickest way to reach us is right inside Pipeline — and a real person on our team reads every message.
See Get Help
3. Authorize the Charge
We'll come back with a figure for the months you listed. The fee is priced per period of data rather than per file, and the per-backup cost drops as the order gets bigger — which is the arithmetic behind sending one list instead of three.
Tell us if you only need one or two months and we'll price it accordingly. Reply confirming the months and authorizing the charge, and the Tech Team gets to work.
The account has to be active to receive them. Re-generated backups are delivered into your account, so if you're ordering these on your way out, order and download them before you cancel — not after.
4. Download Them From the Monthly Backups Page
When they're ready, they appear on your Monthly Backups page alongside the current month, and they behave exactly like any other backup: a ZIP per month, transactions sorted into folders by property address, documents in their original format, with notes, emails, checklists, and activity history saved as plain text.
Then the clock starts again. Each re-generated file is downloadable for 30 days and expires after that, so pull them the week they land rather than the month after.
Pipeline generates a downloadable backup of your account every month, included with your plan. Answers to the common questions about what's included, downloading, and ordering past backups.
Downloading a decade of backups isn't quick. Start with the oldest months — those are the ones you'd have the least chance of reconstructing another way — and let the rest run overnight if your connection needs it.
5. Open Every Archive Before the Window Closes
A download that stopped halfway looks completely normal sitting in a folder. It has a name, it has a size, and it's empty when you open it. People find this out months later, when the file is the only copy left.
So check them now, while re-downloading costs nothing. Open each ZIP, click into a couple of transaction folders, and confirm the documents are there and actually open. If one is broken, download it again today — after the 30 days, replacing it means another order.
A backup that won't open, or that throws a "Backup Invalid" error, almost always comes down to an interrupted download or the tool you're using to unzip it. Here's how to clear each cause.