Procreate Heartbreak: Why Your Art Isn’t Safe

In this video I go over how risky it is to not backup your art outside of Procreate.

What You’ll Need to Follow Along

To create a backup of your Procreate that you control and own you’ll need the following:

iPad: if you don’t already have an alternate, external backup of your art, then this is where all of it lives – within the Procreate app on your iPad. To create our own backup we’ll start from within the app.
Access to a Cloud Data Storage Service: This will make creating the initial backup and subsequent backups easier (examples of these services include iCloud, Dropbox, and Google Drive).
(Recommended) One or More External Hard Drives: Although I mention this as technically being optional, I recommend that you keep at least one backup of all of your art on an external drive.

Why This Matters

If you didn’t realize it, you may be just one single failure from losing all of your Procreate art! It almost happened to me. The failure could be due to any number of reasons:

Your iPad screen stops responding (this is what happened with my iPad and when I took to it an Apple store to figure out what my options were, they told me that sometimes this type of failure “just happens” and, based on the age of the device, they couldn’t do anything to repair it)
The device gets physically damaged – it slips out of your hands, slides off of a table, an object’s dropped on it, or it’s damaged by water.
A software glitch – an update of the Procreate app or and iPadOS update causes a glitch that causes you to lose data or stops Procreate from opening.
You or someone with access to your device accidentally deletes the Procreate app.

…Or any other number of random and unexpected scenarios could cause you to lose all of your art. But how… and why?

Where and How Your Art is Stored

All of the wonderful creations you’ve made in Procreate live (are stored) with the app on your iPad as “App Data.” There’s no other automatic backup to another location to add a layer of protection for all of the work you’ve made. There isn’t isn’t an option to assign another location for a backup – it all just lives with the app as “App Data.” This is why even accidentally deleting the Procreate app from your device will immediately result in losing any work that you haven’t already backed up either externally (like to a cloud service or external drive) or to iCloud (if you use iCloud backup). If the version of your iPad with the Procreate app deleted then gets backed up to iCloud, there’s a good chance that you’ve lost everything without another backup (Note: automatic iCloud backups happen when your iPad is connected to wifi, power, and it’s locked).

How to Protect Your Art

The best way to protect your work is to create a backup of your individual art files in a location that you control.

It’s important to back up the individual files because even if you rely on default iCloud backups – these backups are of your entire device. So, if you’re in a situation where you need to restore an iCloud backup to recover your art, you’d also be restoring everything else on your device to the state it was in when that backup was made. This could result in loss of data or progress in other apps.

Check out the video for a full walkthrough for creating a backup – here are the highlights:

Decide where to back up the files: if your iPad supports external drives you can choose to backup there or to a cloud service (like iCloud, Dropbox, or Google). If it doesn’t support external drives your best bet is to use a cloud service. In the video I use iCloud for the first backup.
Organize your art files using stacks and informative file names.
Export the files/stacks to the back up location you chose in Step 1.
Create another backup in an alternate, more broadly supported file format (like PSD)
Create at least one additional backup to another device (like an external hard drive), ideally applying the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies on at least 2 different devices with 1 in a different physical location than the others.

I’ve also created a handy guide walking through the entire Procreate Backup Process – you can get it (and a ton of other creative resources) by joining my newsletter community here:

Note: This post and the photos within it may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the link, I may receive a commission at no extra charge to you.

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