Why we backup all our Figma designs in Sketch
By: Dean Schmid
Tags: Remote Backups, Sketch, Business Continuity, Ux Strategy, Figma

Recently our Design Ops lead announced that we were migrating to Figma.

Yay!

The migration was interesting. We moved from Sketch to Figma.

We also started using a tool called Magicul. It periodically backs up all our Figma designs in S3 as Sketch format.

Why?

Don’t you know Figma has version control?

That’s what I said, but the justifications were:

Figma is a locked ecosystem.

Figma technically only has version history, it’s not version control.

We were previously using Abstract with Sketch, and our compliance wanted us to continue to backup our design files independent of Figma — like we already do for our codebase and regular databases — to avoid lockin.

There are two tools that can backup Figma files

Magicul

https://xd2sketch.com/figma-design-backup

FigPickle

https://figpickle.datapod.app/

note FigPickle has launched, but they only backup as svg and png files — Magicul is the only real option for Figma backups.

Magicul allowed us to back up our Figma files hourly, daily, weekly,

Here’s a little demo file I found from when we were testing the software out.

There are separate backup, redundancies, saved to our own AWS S3 storage.

On top of that, Magicul allows us to back up all files as Sketch files straight out of Figma

We store copies in — Sketch, XD and Figma.

We design in Figma

The Figma backup tool takes a snapshot of our version history saves it as a .fig

The .fig file is copied and converted to Sketch

Both files are saved to our S3 storage

Loop

We have a lot of data in S3 already, and so we figured it would be good practice to backup our design files in the same place.

Let’s talk a little more about why we chose to convert our Fig files to Sketch

1. fig is a proprietary binary file with no public documentation

It’s highly unlikely Figma is going anywhere in the next few years. But who knows what new tools will be popular in the future?

We’d like to be flexible and have the option of migrating elsewhere.

.fig is specific to Figma and cannot be opened by another tool

2. All design software, now and in the future, can open Sketch files.

Sketch files are in JSON format

They are open, readable and universal

InVision, Figma, XD and even browser-based editors like Photopea can open and edit Sketch files.

Figma shipped with its Sketch Import feature.

3. We have file retention guidelines

I’ll summarize what is relevant.

Files should be stored in as few places as possible.

All design files have a designated maturity date of a minimum of 4 years

Avoid ecosystem lock-ins

Magicul was a way to consolidate our Figma design file storage with our existing S3 cloud storage system in AWS.

Our database, our codebase and now our Figma files are all periodically backed up to redundant servers. All the valuable business assets are protected and accounted for on systems we control.

4. Backups are protection from cloud service outages and scheduled maintenance

It’s expensive to have our design team sitting idle.

Another benefit to backing up our Figma files is we always have a snapshot taken within the last 6 hours that we can roll back to if Figma is down or there’s scheduled maintenance.

This takes some coordination, especially once Figma is back online and we need to manually merge our files, but it’s better than waiting and there’s usually something productive you can do with yesterday’s files.

Conclusion

There you have it. The how and why we backup all our Figma design files in Sketch.

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