Moving to a New Device

Before you start (on the old Mac)

1. Make sure you have a current backup. Open Settings → General → Backup & Sync and check that your backup location has synced recently.
2. Then stop backing up from the old Mac. Either remove the backup location in the same section, or quit Historicle on the old Mac.

Do this before the new Mac starts backing up to the same folder. Two Macs writing to one backup folder do not warn you or merge their changes: whichever Mac writes last silently overwrites the other. Stopping the old Mac first avoids that completely.

Restore on the new Mac

1. Install Historicle from the Mac App Store and finish onboarding, including the model downloads. Onboarding has no restore option, so you restore afterwards.
2. Open Settings → General → Backup & Sync → Import from Backup.
3. Choose your backup folder (the one the old Mac was backing up to). Historicle shows its size, entries, people and when it was last synced.
4. In Select Import Mode, choose Full Restore, then select Restore Database and confirm.
5. Historicle backs up the journal currently on this Mac, restores from your backup, and restarts.

Why Full Restore? A new install has no entries to lose, and a pre-restore backup is made automatically anyway. Full Restore also brings your search index, face data and API keys with it. The other option, Merge Import, is for a Mac that already has entries of its own that you want to keep alongside the imported ones.

Encrypted backups

Restoring from an encrypted backup works: enter your passphrase or your recovery code when asked.

What does not work yet is continuing to back up into the same encrypted folder from the new Mac, because the key for it stays on the old Mac. Instead, create a new, empty folder on the new Mac and add it as an encrypted backup location (you will set a new passphrase and get a new recovery code). Keep the old folder as an archive.

After restoring

• Backup location. Add it again under Settings → General → Backup & Sync. For a plain (unencrypted) backup, you can add the same folder you just restored from. Do this only after the old Mac has stopped backing up to it, and leave "Encrypt this backup" unticked. For an encrypted backup, use a new folder instead (see Encrypted backups).
• Historicle Pro. Go to Settings → Help → Restore Purchases, signed into the Apple ID used for the purchase.
• Chat and speech models. If you used the chat LLM or Speech Recognition, download them again under Settings → AI. Models are not part of a backup.
• Claude Desktop. If you connected it through MCP, add the Historicle entry to Claude Desktop's configuration again. See MCP setup.
• Settings. Any preferences you had changed will be back at their defaults, because preferences are not in the backup.

What a backup carries

With Full Restore, these come across:

• Entries, people, interests, goals and chat conversations
• Photos with their thumbnails, and audio with its transcripts
• The search index, face data and server API keys

These do not:

• Preferences and settings, including your chosen models
• Your list of backup locations
• Downloaded models
• Your Pro purchase (restore it from Apple)
• Encryption keys kept on the old Mac
• The Claude Desktop MCP configuration

If something goes wrong

Restores are applied when Historicle restarts, and each outcome has its own message.

"Restore not applied"

Two different situations show this same title. Tell them apart by the message text.

• "...was damaged, so it was not applied." The backup you chose could not be used. Historicle set the damaged copy aside and kept your current journal unchanged, so nothing was lost. Try a different backup folder, or an older backup if you have one.
• "The restore will be tried again the next time the app starts." The restore could not be applied right now, for the reason shown in the message. Your journal is unchanged, and the restore is staged and will apply on the next launch. Just quit and reopen Historicle. Do not start a different restore in the meantime. The message names the folder to delete if you would rather cancel the staged restore.

"Restore failed"

The restore could not finish and the journal could not be put back exactly as it was. The message names a folder where your recent entries are preserved.

Do not delete the pending_restore folder. Restart the app to try again. If it fails again, contact support and keep the folder named in the message.

More help is on the troubleshooting page.