Moving to another computer

A profile holds everything Butin has gathered for a set of accounts: the sessions you signed in with, every cached report, and every document it downloaded. Export packs all of it into one file you can carry to another computer on a USB key or through your own cloud storage; Import unpacks it there as a new profile.

Both live in Profiles — the profile menu in the top bar, then Manage profiles.

Exporting

Open the menu on a profile's card and choose Export…. Butin asks for a passphrase, then where to save the file (<profile>-<date>.butin).

The passphrase is not optional, and it matters more than a normal one: the archive holds your live sessions in a form that works on any machine, so anyone who has both the file and the passphrase has your accounts. Pick something you don't use elsewhere.

When the archive is written, Butin shows a recovery code once. It opens the archive if the passphrase is ever lost. Nothing else will — there is no reset, because there is no server holding a copy.

A locked profile can't be exported — while it's locked, Butin doesn't hold the key its data is sealed with. Unlock it first.

Importing

On the other computer, open Manage profiles and choose Import profile…, pick the file, and enter the passphrase (or the recovery code — either works).

Butin then shows you what the archive holds — how many services and files, when it was packed — before writing anything, along with the name it will use. That name starts as the one it was exported under and you can change it right there, which is worth doing if you're importing onto a machine that already has a profile by that name.

Confirm, and it lands as a new profile, sitting alongside whatever profiles that machine already has. Nothing you already have is changed, replaced, or merged. If the name is already taken, Butin adds (imported) to it rather than leaving you with two profiles you can't tell apart.

If anything goes wrong partway — a corrupted file, a full disk — the import is abandoned whole. There is no half-restored profile to clean up.

What comes across

• Your sessions, so connected services keep working without signing in again.
• Every cached report — the tabs look exactly as they did on the old machine, with their full history.
• Every downloaded document, including files you'd pointed at a folder outside Butin. Those are brought back into the profile's own documents/ folder, since the old path may not exist on the new machine. Butin tells you which services that applied to.
• Your settings for each service, and your table layouts.

A couple of things deliberately stay behind:

• The browser's own stored session. Butin re-creates it from the session that travelled, the first time you open a service's login window — there's nothing for you to do.
• Logs. They describe a machine, not your data.

After importing

The copy arrives unencrypted, even if the profile it came from was encrypted — encryption at rest is a choice each machine makes for itself. If you want it on this one, turn it on from the profile's menu under Encryption.

If a service was signed in on the old machine but its stored secret couldn't be read there — usually because the profile had already been copied between machines by hand — Butin says so after the import, and you just sign in to that service again.

Keeping the archive

An archive is a point-in-time copy, not a sync. Nothing on either machine changes after you make one, and the two profiles drift apart from then on. It also makes a perfectly good backup — keep it somewhere safe and it will restore the same way.