I have been using Postman for a while now and had created many (over 100?) requests in several collections. I decided today that I would hate to lose these, and saw that one of the benefits of creating an account was āBackup your data to the Postman cloudā. So I created an account & signed inā¦ and I now have an empty workspace. All of my collections and requests are gone. I signed out, and still gone.
Ironic, huh?
How do I restore them?
Thanks!
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If you login to https://web.postman.co do you see any of your data?
Also curious, were you using the Free tier and the upgraded to Pro? Or were you just not logged into the app and then decided to sign up for the Free tier?
Thanks for replying.
When I log in, itās empty.
I was just not logged into the app and then decided to sign up for the Free tier.
That is really odd because I just tried this locally and was not able to replicate the issue.
Can you tell us what OS and Version of the app you are running?
@crutchMan FYI the exact same thing happened to me last week! I had hundreds of api endpoints and a dozen environments setup locally only. Then I decided that I should try to create an online account, but I didnāt immediately sync anything, just signed up with intention to hit that sync button āsoonāā¦ then a few days later (5 days ago) I was happily using Postman and then the Postman app flashed/blinked/wigged out for a moment and BAAAAM, all of my endpoints and environments were wiped out. Not workspaces, collections, nada. They were not synced to the cloud and I couldnāt get them to show locally. Tried reinstalling. Tried upgrading the the most recent version (was one version behind). Nothing worked.
I gave up trying, after I found some article that said it might be some database corruption, and asked for a co-worker to provide me with their setup (which I had exported for him a few months back). Still missing a lot, but Iām thankful I have something.
@tmccann my OS is Windows 10 Enterprise Version 1803 build 17134.590. I now have Postman v7.0.9, but like I said the problem occurred just before I upgraded, not sure which version that was.
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One more note, none of my coworkers had the same problem. I was the only one with data loss. We are on the same OS, but not sure about the exact version of postman. But I was the only one stupid enough to not have a backup of some type.
FYI, hereās the response I got from support:
Would like to inform you that we have fixed this in our 7.0.9 version but the solution wonāt apply here since you are on 7.0.7, the backup will not be there.
Looks like I am out of luck.
This seems like a specific scenario. I looked at the list of big fixes and didnāt see one that specifically met this criteria, however I didnāt read the specifics on every bug fix though.
@Chris Do you know anything more about this?
This happened to me today roughly an hour ago. All of the Collections I manually created from scratch syncād. After I created an account and now that Postman is loaded up with me āloggedā inā¦ Two of my collections are missing. Both of the two collections that are missing were imported externally. Iām not suggesting I manually imported the collections from a postman_collection.json fileā¦ as some of the collections that did sync were imported in that manner.
Noā¦ the two collections that are missing were automatically imported. One of them was imported via a yaml file and the other was imported using a Web Button link on the website for which the API documentation livedā¦ I clicked the button and then after allowing the website access to open Postman the new collection was correctly imported.
Again, itās these last two collectionsā¦ the two I care about more than any of my other collections, are the two that didnāt come over.
Any thoughts as to why these two and only these two collections were missed? The only way I can access them is by signing out. I was worried I lost these as Iāve made a ton of changes to one of those collections. Thankfully after signing out I was able to find these two collections and export them.
Iām here, because this just happened to me too. There was this nagging notification at the top that I really should use an online account and now everything is gone.
Iām not a happy man at the moment
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Ah, just found out there are backup .json files in \AppData\Roaming\Postman. Imported the most recent one and everything is back again. Great!!
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I did exactly what @haayman did and was also able to recover my data. In summary, this was the cause of the problem:
- I had an existing instance of Postman without a logged in account and existing collections.
- I created a Postman account via clicking a prompt in the Postman UI
- Upon creating the new account, I picked the setting to have postman store the new workspace it was creating locally and not backup to the cloud (big no-no without prior approval by our security team)
- The previously existing collections were not there and the settings were restored to default.
To restore:
- Create a new workspace (if not already) and click the āImportā button (near the upper left, by My Workspace)
- Look in
\AppData\Roaming\Postman, find the latest file namedbackup-<ISO Datetime>.json - If you are on Mac or Linux the path to the dir with the backup files is
~/Library/Application Support/Postmanor~/.config/Postman/(see this link)
Tada. This restored the collections but it does not restore the settings. For my case this was only dark mode 
but if you have a richer set of custom settings Iām not sure if those are also backed up anywhere?
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This worked for me as well. I just retrieved the json backup file and imported it.
Thanks for this.
Stephen
If you just signed into Postman and do not find the collections, would you please try switching to the scratchpad and see if you find them there?
To do so, navigate to the gear icon on the top right > Settings > Scratchpad.
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Thank you, You saved my day.
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Save my life! Thank you
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THANK YOU !!! I thought I had lost everything
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YOU ARE THE MANā¦ But where its stored as I search my local and did not find any.
THANK YOU.
I wasnāt logged in as anyone on my previous version of Postman and the new version defaults to asking for login. I was able to retrieve my collections by going to the gears icon (Settings) and selecting āScratch Padā. Hope that helps.
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Thanks a lot !
You made my day !
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