How to Run an Asana Backup?

Asana is a project management tool that helps you to plan, organize, and collaborate on projects. 

With so much data being generated on Asana, it’s important that you back up your account to keep track of your history and prevent data losses. 

With this in mind, this article will discuss how you can back up data from your Asana account.

Why should you back up Asana history?

There are different reasons for running an Asana data backup. Some include:

• For data security

Asana takes daily snapshots of its databases and copies them to a different data centre for backup. But these backups are run only once per day, so everything added/changed after the last backup is vulnerable and can be lost.

• To mitigate the risks of human error

People make mistakes sometimes. Having an Asana backup can be really useful if someone accidentally deletes some data or alters it beyond repair. In such cases, restoring the data can reduce downtime and allows your team to resume their work on projects conveniently. 

• For proper data analytics

To back up for analytical purposes, you’ll create an extra copy of data in a spreadsheet or data warehouse and use it to fuel dashboards, reports, etc. This allows you to combine Asana data with the data flowing from the other apps you use. Such historical data is also helpful for predictive analytics and advanced reporting using tools like Tableau or PowerBI. 

How to back up Asana? 

There’s no built-in utility for backing up an entire Asana account but users can export each project and a list of tasks manually. This is useful when you’re trying to create individual reports for each project. However, if you need to perform such backups regularly, it’s going to be a repetitive and time-consuming task.

If you’re looking at exporting your entire workspaces or, for example, all your tasks at once, you’ll need to go with a third-party solution. Such tools can serve as backup and restoration utilities but can also be used for analytical purposes. 

There are two main types of backup apps: 

• Backup and restoration apps

These are apps like ProBackup or Rewind that make an automated copy of an entire Asana workspace and keep it on a secure server. Often, you can choose the frequency of backups and decide what exactly should be backed up. 

Such apps also provide utilities for restoring the data into your Asana workspace should the need arise.

• Backup and analysis apps

Apps like Coupler.io create Asana backups mainly for analytical purposes. They allow users to pull data from Asana as well as many other apps, such as HubSpot, Airtable, Harvest, QuickBooks, Salesforce, and more. 

The advantage of such a solution is that you can build much richer Asana reports than you would be able to inside the platform. You can perform any kind of calculations on your data inside a spreadsheet. If visualization is your priority, it’s easy to plug that data further into BI tools, such as Tableau, Looker, or Data Studio.

Back up Asana using the export functionality

For now, let’s focus on Asana’s native features.

How to back up Asana projects?

The first way to perform a manual backup is to export each project manually. This exports a list of all the tasks and other details in a project. 

To export:

• Go to the project you wish to export. 
• Click the dropdown arrow to see Project Actions. 
• Select Export/Print.
• Choose CSV or JSON.

If you select JSON, a link to the JSON file will open in a new tab. On the other hand, a CSV file would be downloaded to your computer.

How to back up Asana tasks

Asana also allows you to export tasks that are not part of any project.

Here’s how:

• Go to My Tasks
• Click the dropdown menu at the top
• Select Export CSV

Users can also export a list of tasks assigned to a particular person. To do that, you need to visit each member’s profile, click the dropdown arrow beside the name and export to CSV. 

Automated Asana backups

Although Asana takes daily snapshots of its databases, they don’t run frequently enough to be a reliable solution. Manual backups create an extra workload for you and are limited. So it would be far more efficient and secure to rely on automated data backups. 

One useful app here is Coupler.io – a data integration and automation platform that can export your Asana data automatically, on the schedule you choose. Using it, you can build auto-updating reports, dashboards, and advanced visualisations of your choice.

With Coupler.io you can connect Asana to Google Sheets or export Asana to Excel. There’s also an option to link Asana to BigQuery. The backups run according to the schedule you choose – weekly, daily, hourly, or even every 15 minutes.

How to back up Asana projects on a schedule?

Now, we’ll explain how to set up Coupler.io for an Asana backup. First, create an account or log in to Coupler.io. There’s a 14-day free trial, and no credit card is required. 

• To start, click the Add Importer button on the home screen. 

• Add a Source app and a Destination app. In this example, we’ll pick Asana and Excel. 

• Connect to your Asana account, select a data entity to export (for example, tasks, projects, stories, portfolios), and pick a start date for your backup. Then, jump to destination settings. 

• Connect your destination account, and select a workbook and a sheet. Then click Jump to schedule settings.

• Lastly, enable automatic data refresh and set up the schedule. 

Choose the frequency, days of the week, and time zone. Then click Save and Run to back up Asana according to your schedule. Below is a screenshot of how Asana data will look in Excel.

Asana data backup – recap

Asana is a widely-used tool for collaborating on tasks and projects. As a result, it’s important to have reliable backups of this data, as backups make it possible for you to recover and restore any lost data without much disruption to your normal business and work activities.  

However, the built-in function in Asana only allows users to export each project and each list of tasks to either JSON or CSV. 

The most convenient method is to automate Asana backups using apps like Coupler.io. As this allows you to automate Asana backups for data security, frequent reporting, and data analytics.