Your data

Wedding Computer is built around a principle of open data: your contacts and weddings are stored in a plain text format you can read, edit, and take with you — without needing Wedding Computer’s software to access them. This is a deliberate design choice, not a feature to be unlocked.

How your data is stored

Every contact and wedding is a Markdown file with YAML frontmatter. Here’s what a contact file looks like:

---
first_name: Sarah
last_name: Thompson
partner_first_name: James
partner_last_name: Chen
email: sarah@example.com
phone: +61 412 345 678
wedding_date: 2025-11-15
status: booked
source: enquiry_form
---

Notes about Sarah and James go here as plain text.

The YAML block at the top contains structured fields — the same ones you see in the CRM. Everything below it is your free-text notes. Open the file in any text editor and it’s immediately readable and editable.

These files live in a storage bucket (Cloudflare R2 by default) structured as a folder of Markdown files. The structure follows the open standard published at wedding.computer/standard. A wedding folder looks like:

weddings/
  sarah-james-2025/
    wedding.md       # wedding details + shared notes
    todo.md          # checklist
    timeline.md      # run sheet
    notes.md         # your private notes
    vendors.md       # generated vendor team list
    log.md           # generated changelog
    files/           # uploaded attachments

wedding.md holds the booking details and shared notes. Ceremony, getting-ready, portrait, and reception times and locations live only in timeline.md, so the same schedule is not repeated in two files. Older exports that included those fields in wedding.md remain importable.

Exporting your data

Portable account archive

Go to Your profile → Export to download a streamed ZIP archive. Wedding Computer builds the download as it sends it instead of assembling the whole archive in memory first.

The archive is a portable, human-readable reference copy containing:

Your account profile
Every wedding you can currently access as an active member
For vendor accounts: the vendor profile, contacts, invoices, invoice payments, and calendar events, plus a portable contacts.csv
Markdown files that Wedding Computer can verify you are authorized to access
Uploaded wedding documents and form files that Wedding Computer can verify you are authorized to access
A manifest and JSON reference file describing the archive and its structured records

Only authorized data is included. A wedding is excluded after your active access to it ends, and another member’s private files are excluded unless they were shared with you.

The account archive is available on both free and Pro plans. It remains a portable reference archive rather than a complete one-click backup. For an eligible v1 vendor archive, you can now upload the original ZIP under Account → Data → Preview archive restore, check it strictly, and then explicitly recover missing contacts; the rest of the archive is not a full account import.

Other downloads

From a wedding timeline, Export → Print run sheet (PDF) and Export → Save as wallpaper (PNG) create standalone versions of that run sheet. These are separate from the account archive.

For an immediate CRM spreadsheet, open Contacts and choose Download contacts CSV. It exports the current vendor’s real, non-demo contacts in the same UTF-8, RFC 4180, spreadsheet-safe 31-column format used by the archive. It is one account-wide contact list, not an individual per-contact download, and there is still no separate per-wedding full-folder download.

Vendor account archives also include contacts.csv. If you extract that file and upload it through Importing contacts, its 21 core contact fields map automatically. Provenance, tags, lost-status information, and form data remain available as structured extra details.

This CSV is a portable way to move contacts, not a full account restore: it does not recreate every account setting or linked record. Large archives are automatically split into numbered CSV files; extract and import each shard separately. Each shard stays below 10 MB and 16,000 contacts, because the CSV’s 31 columns reach the importer’s expanded-cell safety limit before the generic 20,000-row limit.

Reading your data without Wedding Computer

Because the files are plain Markdown, you can open them in any text editor — Notepad, TextEdit, VS Code, Obsidian, iA Writer, or anything else. No special software, no file converter, no account needed. The format will remain readable in any text editor for as long as text editors exist.

Obsidian sync (Pro)

If you already keep your business notes in Obsidian — for the backlinks, the graph view, or just because you want your notes on your own disk instead of behind a login — you don’t have to choose between that and running your CRM in Wedding Computer. The official Obsidian plugin mirrors your contacts and weddings into your vault as real Markdown files, so the same data you work with in the CRM is also something you can script, grep, back up with your usual vault backup, put under version control, or read offline on a plane with no connection at all. Install it from the Obsidian community plugins directory (search “Wedding Computer Sync”).

With the plugin configured:

Your contacts and weddings appear as Markdown notes in Obsidian
Edits you make in Obsidian sync back to Wedding Computer
Changes made in Wedding Computer appear in Obsidian on the next sync

The plugin authenticates using your integration token, generated under Settings → Calendar & contacts → Advanced integrations. Copy it when it is shown once and store it securely. Conflict detection is etag-based: if both Wedding Computer and your vault edited the same file, both versions are preserved and a conflict is flagged for you to resolve manually.

The vault sync API is a Pro feature.

Resolving storage conflicts

Wedding Computer uses version identifiers to stop one editor silently overwriting another. If the app tries to save a Markdown file after its connected-storage copy has changed, both candidates are preserved and the conflict is added to Storage conflicts. A banner on the vendor dashboard tells you when any are waiting.

Open a conflict to compare:

App version — the content Wedding Computer was trying to save.
Storage version — the newest content currently in connected storage.

You then have three choices:

Keep app version writes the app candidate to storage and applies it through the normal import path.
Keep storage version keeps the latest storage content and updates Wedding Computer’s index from it.
Merge versions starts with the app candidate in a raw Markdown editor. Combine the parts you need, then save the merged content.

Read the whole file before deciding. Keeping either side discards the other side from the active file, and a malformed YAML block can stop the merged document being applied. If storage changes again while the comparison screen is open, Wedding Computer refuses to overwrite it; reload the conflict and review the new version.

The current app stores new vendor vaults in Wedding Computer’s private Cloudflare R2 storage. It does not currently offer a setting for connecting a new personal GitHub repository. Older internal or legacy storage records do not change that launch behaviour.

What happens if you leave or if Wedding Computer shuts down

If you decide to leave, download the portable account archive while your account and wedding access are still active. Its Markdown files open in any text editor, its JSON file preserves the structured reference data, and authorized uploads remain in their original file formats. You can then move the contents manually into the tools you choose.

The ZIP is still a reference archive rather than a complete one-click restore file for Wedding Computer or another service. Keep a current copy somewhere you control if you expect to close your account.

Check the complete ZIP before recovery

This is the path for a specific, narrow emergency: you’ve lost access to your vendor account, or contacts have been accidentally deleted, and you have an earlier portable account archive you exported while everything was still intact. Rather than trusting that ZIP blindly, Wedding Computer lets you check it for problems first and then recover just the contacts from it — it is not a general restore for weddings, invoices, or settings.

Open Account → Data → Preview archive restore and choose the original ZIP from your Wedding Computer export. Keep it zipped and unchanged. The browser uploads it to private Wedding Computer storage in small, retry-safe parts, then Wedding Computer performs a strict check of the complete archive: it rejects unsafe or unsupported ZIP structures and compares the manifest with the archive’s declared files, sizes, and checksum inventory.

The preview shows the archive format and export time, record counts, reported problems, and which entries remain reference-only. Uploading and checking never creates, replaces, or deletes account records. If the preview marks the contacts as eligible and the create-and-preserve counts look right, choose Recover contacts and confirm. That separate confirmation is required before recovery starts.

Automatic contact recovery is available only for a vendor account’s existing wedding-computer-portable-v1 archive with no more than 1,000 contacts, no contact CSV shard larger than 4 MiB, and no more than 8 MiB of contact CSV data in total. The whole ZIP must pass validation, every declared contact shard must be present, the export must report no missing, partial, or warning entries, and the contacts must pass the current-account safety review.

After confirmation, recovery uses stable identities from the archive and creates only contacts that are missing from your vendor account. It checks the current account and its connected Markdown storage, and preserves every existing contact unchanged; it does not replace, merge, or delete contacts. Weddings, invoices, invoice payments, calendar events, Markdown, uploaded files, memberships, and account settings remain reference-only and are not recovered.

Recovery runs asynchronously after confirmation, so it is safe to leave or close the page and return later to check its status. You can still cancel while the ZIP is uploading. Starting a different archive check replaces an earlier unfinished or preview-ready upload so that only one check remains active for your account.

If recovery reports a failure, it may already have created some new contacts. Re-upload the same original archive: because recovery reuses those stable identities and is create-only, it preserves those contacts and fills in only the ones still missing. When recovery completes or reaches a terminal failure, the private ZIP and staged contact data are removed; a durable cleanup record keeps retrying safely if removal does not succeed immediately.

If the full ZIP cannot be uploaded, expand Advanced: check manifest.json only, unzip the archive yourself, and select manifest.json. This fallback checks only what the manifest declares; it does not inspect the other files in the ZIP and cannot establish contact-recovery eligibility.

Passwords and other account credentials, active sessions, payment credentials, OAuth secrets, and calendar or contact feed tokens are permanently excluded from the archive recovery and are never recreated. External services must be reconnected manually.

The open standard

The file format used by Wedding Computer is published at wedding.computer/standard as an open specification. Any application can implement it — there’s no licence fee, no approval process. If another tool reads and writes the same format, your data moves between them without any conversion.