Why Figma is hard to back up
The design files themselves live in Figma’s cloud, out of reach of any local backup tool — and that is the right place for them. What lives on your Mac is everything that makes Figma feel like yours on this particular machine: the installed fonts the desktop app reads through the local font service, the .fig files you exported as offline archives, the plugin preferences and authentication tokens, and the handoff assets you export to disk for developers. Lose the Mac and you still have your files. Lose the Mac and you have also lost three years of licensed font installs and every plugin setting.
How macup handles it
macup backs up the font directories macOS and Figma read from — ~/Library/Fonts and /Library/Fonts if you have access — so a new Mac opens Figma with the same typography you paid for. Exported .fig archives, developer handoffs, and design-review PDFs are included from whatever working directory you keep them in.
Plugin preferences and cached credentials from ~/Library/Application Support/Figma are captured so that on a restored Mac the desktop app reopens with the same plugins configured. The large font cache and GPU shader cache are excluded because Figma rebuilds them on first launch.
Because Figma’s source files are safe in the cloud, this backup set is small and fast. Continuous backup with chunked deduplication means a font install or a preference change produces a tiny snapshot. AES-256 encryption on the Mac before upload applies here the same way it does for any other set.
Recommended policy
A backup set configured like this covers the important things and skips the regeneratable ones:
name: Figma local assets
include:
- ~/Library/Fonts
- ~/Library/Application Support/Figma/Settings
- ~/Library/Application Support/Figma/Plugins
- ~/Library/Preferences/com.figma.Desktop.plist
- ~/Documents/Figma Exports
- ~/Documents/Figma Archives
exclude:
- "**/Figma/DesktopProfile/ShaderCache/**"
- "**/Figma/Cache/**"
- "**/Figma/GPUCache/**"
- "**/Figma/Code Cache/**"
- "**/Figma/CachedData/**"
schedule:
mode: continuous
debounceSeconds: 30
destination: external-drive
retention:
daily: 30
weekly: 12
monthly: 12Tune further in the macup dashboard per destination.
What you get back
You set up a replacement Mac, sign back into Figma, and find the plugins already configured, the licensed fonts already installed, and the handoff PDFs you exported last month still in the folder you expect. Your in-progress design files arrive from Figma’s cloud. The boring but slow-to-rebuild parts arrive from macup.