Table of Contents

Exporting & Backing Up Your Articles

Jake Peters Updated by Jake Peters

At HelpDocs we take regular backups of all your data, so you don't need to worry.

That said, if you need a copy of your data for any reason, it's super easy to grab it from our API. 

You'll need at least read-only API access on your plan to export your data.

Exporting as JSON

The HelpDocs API is the most flexible way to export data. You can query articles by category, and even select which fields you'd like to view. You can learn more about the API in our API docs.

Downloading a CSV File

If you want to grab a quick copy of all your articles to use as a spreadsheet, or import to another piece of software, a CSV is the answer.

This only works well for a few hundred articles. If you have more, you're better off downloading a .zip file.
  1. Head to Settings > Migrations
  2. Under Export, click Download CSV

By default the CSV will contain the following columns:

article_id

title

description

excerpt

tags

is_published

is_private

show_toc

editor_type

user_id

author_name

url

relative_url

category_id

category_title

category_url

category_relative_url

is_stale

stale_reason

stale_source

stale_triggered_at

updated_at

created_at

CSV Download Options

You can choose to download your CSV file a few different ways by clicking the ▾ dropdown menu icon beside the Download CSV button.

Screenshot of CSV download options
Include Working Copy

Adds has_working_copy column and uses the working copy for text, body, and description fields.

The CSV will contain the following columns:

article_id

title

description

excerpt

tags

is_published

is_private

has_working_copy

show_toc

editor_type

user_id

author_name

url

relative_url

category_id

category_title

category_url

category_relative_url

is_stale

stale_reason

stale_source

stale_triggered_at

updated_at

created_at

Include Body

Includes the text and body fields.

The CSV will contain the following columns:

article_id

title

description

text

body

tags

is_published

is_private

show_toc

editor_type

user_id

author_name

url

relative_url

category_id

category_title

category_url

category_relative_url

is_stale

stale_reason

stale_source

stale_triggered_at

updated_at

created_at

This will not work on accounts with very long article bodies.
Include Both

Has all the fields mentioned above ☝️

Include Neither

Includes only an excerpt field (the first 1000 characters of the article body) and no data about Working Copy.

This is the default for CSV exports.

Downloading a ZIP File

You can export your categories and articles to a .zip file and it'll sort them out into folders for you, with metadata included as .yaml files.

  1. Head to Settings > Migrations
  2. Under Export, click Download ZIP

Exporting to Google Sheets

Creating a Google Sheet of your articles is just as simple.

  1. Head to Settings > API Keys and create an API key
  2. Create a new Google Sheet
  3. In the top left cell, type =IMPORTDATA("https://api.helpdocs.io/v1/article?format=csv&key=your_api_key")
    Don't forget to replace your_api_key in the link above with the API key you just created.
  4. Hit Return
  5. Save your new sheet

Google will pull all your articles from the HelpDocs API and display them in your sheet.

You can download a copy of your data by going to File > Download As... and selecting a file format of your choice. I'd go for a .xls 🙌
Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers work best for opening as .csv. If you haven't got access to any of these, a simple text editor should do the trick.

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