Data and backups
Your till lives here. Your backup goes with you.
Proper Till keeps your products, sales and settings in your own browser. That is what makes it free, private and quick to start. It also means the backup file you download is the thing that protects you, so this page explains the whole arrangement in plain terms.
Where your till is kept
Everything operational lives in a database that belongs to this browser, on this device: your products and categories, your till layout, your sessions, completed sales, receipts, refunds and settings. It is not uploaded to Proper Till, because there is no Proper Till server to upload it to.
Two practical consequences follow. Your data cannot be read by us, sold, mined or lost in somebody else's outage. And it is not automatically copied anywhere either, which is why backups matter.
Browser storage is not a backup
This is the single most important sentence on the site. A browser database can be removed by:
- clearing browsing data, site data or "cookies and other site data";
- a browser cleanup tool or privacy extension;
- using a different browser, profile or device;
- losing, wiping or replacing the device;
- the browser reclaiming space when storage runs low;
- working in a private or incognito window, where storage is designed to vanish.
Proper Till asks the browser to keep your data persistently where that is supported, tells you honestly what the browser said, and keeps a visible reminder of when you last downloaded a backup. What it cannot do is promise that a browser will hold your records forever. Nothing that runs in a browser can promise that, and a product that implies otherwise is misleading you.
What a backup file is
One button produces one file: a complete, dated snapshot of your
till in a documented, versioned format, ending in
.propertill.json. It contains everything the till
holds, including a count of every kind of record and a checksum
of the whole contents.
The checksum is the part that earns its keep. When you come to restore, Proper Till recalculates it and compares. If a single character of the file has changed, whether through a bad copy, a failing disk or a well-meaning edit in a text editor, the restore stops before it starts.
The file is yours. Keep it where you keep other important business files: a second device, an external drive, or whatever cloud storage you already trust and pay for. Proper Till does not put it anywhere for you, and does not watch what you do with it.
Restoring, without gambling your current data
Restoring replaces the till in this browser with the one in the file. That is a serious operation, so it is built to be reversible right up to the last instant:
- The file is checked completely first: format, version, checksum and the internal relationships between sales, sessions and refunds.
- A safety backup of your current till is downloaded first, so the state you are leaving is never the only copy.
- You confirm deliberately by typing a confirmation, not by clicking past a dialog.
- The incoming data is loaded into a brand new database alongside your current one, and checked again once loaded.
- Only then does the till switch across, in a single step.
- Your previous database is kept until the next successful start, not deleted the moment the new one appears.
If anything fails at any point, the switch never happens and your working till carries on exactly as it was. A refused restore is a normal, safe outcome, not an emergency.
Moving your till to another machine
Download a backup on the old machine, open Proper Till on the new one, and restore. That is the supported way to move, and it is deliberate: there is no background sync, so there is never a moment where two devices disagree about what was sold and you have to work out which one is right.
If you want a till on two counters at once, treat them as two tills. Each keeps its own records and its own receipt numbering, and you cash them up separately, the way two physical tills have always worked.
Exports are a different thing
A backup is for putting the till back. Exports are for working with your numbers elsewhere: your catalogue, sales, tenders, refunds, discounts and cash-up figures as spreadsheet files you can open, print, file or send to your accountant. Both matter, and neither replaces the other.
The habit worth having
Download a backup at the end of a trading day, or at least whenever you have done work you would hate to redo, such as importing or repricing a lot of products. Keep the last few. That is the entire discipline, and it is the difference between a bad afternoon and a lost year.