Your books are a folder on disk. Here’s exactly what’s in it and how it’s protected.
Everything lives under ~/Documents/total/:
companies/<slug>/company.db — one SQLite file per company; this is the single source of truth for every ledger, voucher, and reportcompanies/<slug>/backups/ — automatic snapshots (see below)companies/<slug>/exports/ — PDFs, CSVs, and JSON you’ve exported (invoices, GST returns, CA packs, registers)Total takes a WAL-safe snapshot of the active company automatically — every 30 minutes while it’s open, once when you open a company, and once when you quit. It keeps the most recent 20 automatic snapshots and prunes older ones; any backup you take manually is never pruned.
Go to Settings → Backups, pick a snapshot, and restore it. Before it overwrites anything, Total takes a pre-restore safety copy of your current database — so a restore can never silently destroy the state you restored away from.
Automatic snapshots live next to your company file, which protects you from a bad voucher but not from a dead disk. For that, export an encrypted backup — a single AES-256-GCM file locked with a passphrase you choose — and copy it to a drive, another machine, or cloud storage of your choice. Total never uploads it anywhere itself.
Copy the whole ~/Documents/total/ folder to the new machine and open Total — every company, with full history, comes across intact. There’s no export/import step and nothing to re-enter.
Nothing about your business — no ledger names, no amounts, no company data of any kind — ever leaves the machine. The only network call Total makes on its own is a periodic check against the update endpoint to see whether a newer version is available; that request carries a version number and nothing else.