Get your shelf out of Credenza

The shelf lives in the browser, and browsers get cleared

Credenza is local first. Your cards, your photos, and your measurements sit in browser storage on the device you added them on. That is what makes the app work with no account, no email, and no card. It is also the risk: the same button that clears cookies for a shopping site clears your shelf.

So the app never treats your data as its own. Three routes lead out, and none of them asks permission. A file you keep. A spreadsheet you open in Numbers, Excel or Sheets. An account that holds one copy of the shelf so a second device can read it.

The .json backup: a file that restores

Open the menu and choose Import & backup. Press Download your shelf as a .json backup. The browser saves a file named credenza-shelf- plus today's date, so a folder of them sorts oldest to newest with no renaming.

The file holds every card exactly as the app stores it: title, seller, price and currency, size, recommended size, your notes, the QC photos, the haul it belongs to, and the canonical marketplace link. It is not a screenshot and not a report. It is the shelf.

To bring it back, press Restore a .json backup on the same screen and choose the file. Credenza reads it card by card and skips any card whose link is already on the shelf. Restore the same file twice and the second pass tells you so — “Backup read — everything in it is already on the shelf.” Nothing is duplicated, and nothing you added since is overwritten.

One deliberate asymmetry is worth knowing. Deleted cards are recorded separately from the shelf, so a backup restores cards without also restoring the record of your deletions. A card you deleted on purpose stays deleted when a sync runs. A card you restore from a file comes back.

The .csv: for a spreadsheet, not for the app

The .csv answers a different question. You do not restore it. You open it in a spreadsheet and total a haul, sort by price, or filter to the items you have not paid for yet. Press Export a .csv for Numbers, Excel or Sheets. This one is Pro.

The file has fifteen columns, in this order:

• Title, Haul, Status, Seller
• Size, Recommended size
• Price, Currency, Price USD
• Weight (g)
• Buy link, Photos link, Source link
• Notes, Added

Price and Price USD are two columns on purpose. Sellers quote in yuan; you budget in your own currency; a spreadsheet cannot add a column that mixes both. Weight (g) is there so a haul total lines up with what the parcel planner estimates.

A detail you will not notice unless it is missing: a cell that starts with =, + or @ is treated as a formula by Excel and Sheets. Seller names and notes do that more often than you would think. Credenza marks those cells as text before writing them, and leaves real numbers alone so a price column still totals.

The account: one copy on the server, for a second device

A backup is a file you remember to take. An account is the version that runs without you. Sign in and one copy of the shelf lives on the server, so a second device reads the same cards.

The two halves are split by plan, and the split is not arbitrary. Pull is free. A person who loses a phone signs in on a new one and their shelf is there. Charging for that would turn a lost phone into lost data. Continuous push is Pro — keeping two devices in step as you edit is the ongoing work, and it is what costs storage.

A free account still saves once after a pull, so the merged result is kept rather than thrown away. Otherwise the first sign-in on a second device would show you the merge and then quietly forget it.

Your body measurements are not part of any of this. They stay on the device, sync on or sync off. Read what the body profile stores for what that covers.

What happens when two devices disagree

Sync is not a copy. It is a merge, and the rules are worth stating because they decide what happens to work you did offline.

• The newer edit wins. Each card carries the time it last changed. Edit the same card on a phone and a laptop, and the later edit is the one that survives.
• Your order does not move. The shelf you are looking at keeps its order. Cards from the server are added after, never shuffled in.
• A delete stays deleted. Deleting a card records the deletion, so a second device that still has that card does not push it back. Those records are kept for 90 days, which is far longer than any device stays offline.
• An edit after a delete wins. If you delete a card on one device and then type into it on another, the typing is a decision. The card comes back.
• A failed read changes nothing. If the server copy cannot be read, the app keeps what is on the device and touches nothing.

The screen you hope not to see

If browser storage is unreadable — a corrupted profile, a full disk, a private window with storage disabled — Credenza does not start over and does not overwrite. It shows one screen that says so, and gives you four choices:

• Try again — reload and read the storage once more.
• Download recovery data — save the raw unreadable bytes to a file before anything else happens.
• Restore a backup — open the file you took earlier.
• Continue without saving — use the app for this session only.

The order matters. Download the recovery data first, even if you do not know what to do with it. It costs one click, and it is the only copy of what was there.

Take the backup at the point you would miss it

Nobody keeps a backup schedule for a shopping app. So tie it to the moments that already exist:

• After a long session of adding cards, before you close the tab.
• Before you clear browsing data for any reason.
• Before a phone reset, a browser change, or handing on a laptop.
• After a haul ships, as the record of what you paid and what arrived.

That last one is the underrated case. A .json from March tells you the size you ordered, the seller you used, and what it cost, six months after the listing is gone.

What is free, and what is not

The .json backup and the restore are free, on every plan, signed in or not. So is pull — the half of sync that gets your shelf back onto a new device.

Pro adds the .csv export and continuous push, the half that keeps two devices in step as you work. See what each plan covers, or what the free plan includes with the real daily numbers.