Back up iA Writer on Mac.

Why iA Writer is hard to back up

iA Writer is the easy case that still goes wrong. Your writing is plain Markdown, which means a year of daily output fits in the space of a single RAW photo. What trips people up is the library location: iA Writer points at a folder, often inside iCloud Drive, sometimes on an external volume, sometimes under ~/Documents. Move that folder and iA Writer forgets where everything is. Sync the folder to a second Mac without a backup and an iCloud hiccup can propagate a deletion across every device before you notice. The sidecar conventions — templates, content blocks, and custom themes in ~/Library/Containers/pro.writer.mac — are also easy to miss.

How macup handles it

macup backs up the library folder wherever it lives, including the iCloud Drive path. iCloud Drive files that are evicted to the cloud are detected and materialised before snapshotting so you end up with the bytes, not the placeholder. Continuous backup fires on every save, and because Markdown is small, each snapshot is almost free.

Settings, custom templates, content blocks, and installed themes from ~/Library/Containers/pro.writer.mac/Data/Library are captured too. Restoring to a new Mac gives you iA Writer with the same smart-punctuation preferences and the same custom templates it had before.

Chunked deduplication means that editing one paragraph in a long essay produces bytes of new storage, not kilobytes. The deep versioning history is a feature, not a cost. Every revision is AES-256 encrypted on the Mac before it leaves.

Recommended policy

A backup set configured like this covers the important things and skips the regeneratable ones:

name: iA Writer library
include:
- ~/Library/Mobile Documents/27N4MQEA55~pro~writer/Documents
- ~/Documents/iA Writer
- ~/Library/Containers/pro.writer.mac/Data/Library/Application Support/iA Writer
- ~/Library/Containers/pro.writer.mac/Data/Library/Preferences
exclude:
- "**/.DS_Store"
- "**/.Trash/**"
- "**/*.icloud"
- "**/Containers/pro.writer.mac/Data/Library/Caches/**"
schedule:
mode: continuous
debounceSeconds: 10
materialiseICloud: true
destination: macup-cloud
retention:
daily: 60
weekly: 52
monthly: 120

Tune further in the macup dashboard per destination.

What you get back

You deleted a paragraph three weeks ago and only noticed this morning. Open the dashboard, pick the document, scroll the timeline back, and copy the paragraph out of the snapshot from that day. Or restore the whole library to a new Mac and watch iA Writer pick up exactly where you left off, custom templates and all.