Clipthesis Backup

Clipthesis Backup keeps a secure copy of your media in the cloud, so you can recover footage even if a drive fails or goes missing. It is content-addressed and deduplicated — identical clips are only ever stored once, no matter how many drives they live on.

Pricing & subscribing

Clipthesis Backup is a usage-based subscription: $0.01 per GB per month (that's $10/TB), metered daily and billed monthly in arrears — you pay only for what you actually store, with no tiers and no minimum. A payment card is required up front, but nothing is charged until you've stored something.

To subscribe:

1. Go to Settings → Account and sign in
2. Click Subscribe under Clipthesis Backup
3. Complete checkout in your browser — the app unlocks automatically a few seconds after payment

Library sync is separate — it's free for all signed-in users and doesn't require a Backup subscription. Clipthesis Backup adds cloud storage for the footage itself.

Managing your subscription

Settings → Account shows how much you have stored and an estimate of the current period's cost. Click Manage billing to open the billing portal, where you can update your payment method, view invoices, or cancel. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing period, and your final invoice covers only the storage used up to then.

If your subscription lapses

Clipthesis Backup only stores data for active subscriptions:

• If you cancel, your backup data is permanently deleted when the subscription ends (at the end of your final billing period). Download or restore anything you want to keep before the period ends.
• If a payment fails, Clipthesis shows a warning in Settings and keeps your access active while the payment is retried. You have 16 days from the failed payment to update your payment method in the billing portal — after that, your backup data is permanently deleted. A successful payment at any point during those 16 days cancels the deletion and nothing is lost.

Your local footage is never touched — deletion only affects the cloud copies. See Data retention & deletion.

Backing up a drive

1. Go to Drives
2. On the drive card, choose Back up to Clipthesis Backup

Backups run in the background — you can keep browsing, importing, and tagging while they upload. While a backup is running:

• The cloud status chip in the bottom bar shows live progress (Backing up… 42%), on every page — or Scheduled while a drive waits its turn.
• The drive's card on the Drives page shows Backing up… with the same percentage.
• Click the chip and choose Details on the Media backup row to open a details dialog with per-file progress, dedup counts, and any skipped files. The dialog is fully dismissable — press Esc, click outside it, or use Hide and the backup keeps running. Cancel backup stops the run (and anything queued behind it).

When the run finishes, the drive card updates to Backed up … · N files. Because backups are deduplicated, a second run of an unchanged drive uploads nothing — it just confirms everything is already safe.

Automatic backups

Turn on the Auto-backup toggle on a drive's card and Clipthesis backs that drive up by itself — no clicks needed. Automatic backups run:

• When the drive's content changes — after an index or re-index that finds new or removed files, an import onto the drive, a copy to a working drive, or a download from backup. Changes are debounced, so a scan that touches hundreds of files still produces a single backup run.
• When the drive connects — plugging in an opted-in drive triggers a backup if its content changed since the last snapshot (or it has never been backed up). A drive that's already fully backed up reconnects quietly, without creating a redundant snapshot.
• When the app opens — shortly after launch, Clipthesis checks every connected auto-backup drive and backs up any with outstanding work: content that changed since the last snapshot, or a drive that has never completed a backup.

You can enable the toggle on a disconnected drive too — that arms the backup for the next time the drive is plugged in.

The bottom-bar status

Backup shares the cloud status chip at the right of the bottom bar with library sync. The chip shows the overall picture — Cloud · 2h ago when everything is settled, Backing up… 42% mid-run, Scheduled while work waits, or an amber alert if the last run failed.

Click the chip to expand it. The Media backup row shows live progress (with a Details button mid-run), Backup scheduled while work is queued, when the last backup completed, or Last backup failed in amber — plus a Back up now button for every connected auto-backup drive. If no drive has backup enabled yet, the row offers Set up, which takes you to Drives.

A few things to know:

• Automatic backups require being signed in with an active Clipthesis Backup subscription. When either is missing they are skipped quietly and pick back up once you sign in or resubscribe — nothing errors, and nothing is forgotten.
• Transient failures (network drops, server hiccups) retry on their own with increasing delays. If a run keeps failing, Clipthesis stops retrying and the drive card shows the failure on its status line — the next content change or reconnect tries again.
• Cancelling a backup from the details dialog also clears anything waiting to run. Automatic backups never restart themselves after you cancel; the next trigger starts fresh.
• Manual Back up clicks still work exactly as before on any drive, whether or not Auto-backup is on.

The "backed up" indicator

Once a clip is stored in the cloud, Clipthesis marks it so you can tell at a glance what's protected:

• In the grid — a small cloud badge appears in the bottom-left corner of the clip's thumbnail.
• In the detail view — open a clip and look at the Locations section: a Backed up label appears in the header.

The indicator is content-based: if the same footage exists on several drives, every copy shows the badge once the content is backed up. The badge reads from a local cache first (so it's instant and works offline) and quietly reconciles with the server when you're online, so it stays accurate over time.

Download from Backup

You can pull specific clips back out of the cloud into any folder you choose. Unlike a full restore (below), this copies just the clips you select. When the folder is on a drive Clipthesis tracks, the clips are also indexed as a new location so Clipthesis keeps following them; pick a folder anywhere else and they're simply downloaded.

Download several clips at once

1. In the Library, select one or more clips. At least one must be backed up.
2. In the action bar at the bottom, click Download from Cloud (it appears when some of your selection is backed up).
3. The destination defaults to a Clipthesis Downloads folder on your last-used drive. Click Choose Folder… to pick any folder with the native file browser — on a tracked drive (the drive is detected from the folder, and the clips get indexed there) or anywhere else on your system.
4. Click Download and wait for it to finish. Progress shows the amount transferred (e.g. 1.2 GB of 7.0 GB).

Only backed-up clips are placed; anything in your selection that isn't in the cloud is skipped and reported in the summary. If a clip is already on the destination drive in a different folder, Clipthesis copies it straight into your chosen folder instead of re-downloading it from the cloud — fast, and no bandwidth used. A clip that's already in the chosen folder is skipped.

Download a single clip

1. Open a backed-up clip's detail view.
2. In the Locations section, click Download from Backup.
3. Pick the destination folder with Choose Folder… (or keep the default), then click Download.

After a download

Downloaded files keep their original filenames and are verified byte-for-byte as they arrive. When the destination is on a tracked drive, the clip gains a new location there as soon as the download completes — you'll see it appear in the clip's Locations without refreshing, and it behaves like any other copy (reveal in Finder, copy to a working drive, and so on). Files downloaded to a folder outside your tracked drives are placed but not added to a clip's locations.

Restoring a whole snapshot

If you need to rebuild an entire drive — for example onto a brand-new machine with no local library — use a full restore instead of per-clip downloads:

1. Go to Settings → Backup → Clipthesis Backup
2. Open the restore browser, pick a backed-up drive and a snapshot
3. Choose a destination folder and confirm

A full restore recreates the drive's folder structure exactly, and works even with no local catalog at all.

Data retention & deletion

Your backup data is stored on Backblaze B2 servers in the European Union and kept only while you have an active subscription:

• While subscribed — your backups are kept indefinitely, including through failed-payment retries (see below).
• If you cancel — your backup data is permanently deleted when the subscription ends. Restore anything you want to keep before your final billing period closes.
• If a payment fails — your data is kept for a 16-day grace period from the failed payment. A successful payment during those 16 days cancels the deletion; otherwise the data is permanently deleted.
• On request — you can also request immediate deletion of your backup data at any time by emailing support@clipthesis.com or contacting support in the app (Settings → Help → Feedback & Support).

Deletion is permanent and cannot be undone — it removes the cloud copies only, never the footage on your drives.

Backup vs. local database backup

Clipthesis Backup protects your media files in the cloud. It is different from Backup & Restore, which snapshots your local database (tags, collections, metadata) to disk. Use both for full protection: Clipthesis Backup for the footage, database backups for how you've organized it.