Video: How to Backup Matterport Models using Capture and Apple iTunes | Video courtesy of Matterport YouTube Channel | 29 March 2021

Transcript (video above)

Amir Frank:
Welcome, Matterporters. I wanted to talk to you today about backing up your critical information from Capture. Now, there are a lot of different reasons why you might want to back up your Capture data, but for whatever reason you have for backing up your data, this is how you go about doing it. If you check out the description below, you'll find a bunch of links that will help you navigate through this video to find exactly the information you're looking for. I'm going to start by showing you how to back up your iOS device, and then we'll get to Android in a little bit. For now, let's talk about how to back up everything from Capture if you're using an iOS device.

Amir Frank:
Now, the first thing you want to do of course is connect your iPhone or iPad to your computer using the USB cable and then we'll go ahead and open up iTunes. So I've got iTunes open up here and you can see my iPad is right up here and this little button right here if you're using it iPhone, this'll be a little iPhone icon. And I'll just go ahead and click that. Now I have this backup ups option right here and if you're going to do this just be warned that this is going to back up the entire iPad, everything Capture and non-Capture related items. So this is a complete snapshot of the current state of your iPad and can take some time.

Amir Frank:
So my recommendation if you're just looking to backup Capture is not to go this route. So skip that and go over here to where it says file sharing, click that and then click Capture right over here. And then you can see all the different folders appear that are within Capture. And the most important folder is the jobs folder. This is what has all the models that you have stored in Capture right now. So I'll click on that and then what I can do is just hit save and choose where I want to save it and press save. And I can see a status bar up here, starts to tell me how far we are along in the process. Now this can take a long time.

Amir Frank:
I only have about 6.2 gigabytes. You may have a lot more than that. All right, so now iTunes is done backing up everything onto my computer and to be on the safe side, I'm probably going to want to take that backup that's on my computer and save it to an external hard drive. Just the general rule of thumb with backups you don't want to have them on a single source. So since I'm deleting this from my iPhone, I don't only want to have it on my computer. It's probably best to have it in two different locations.

Amir Frank:
Now let's go ahead and check out what this backup looks like. I'll go to my desktop. After I opened up the jobs folder, I can see all of the sub folders within the jobs folder. And every one of these sub folders is another model. Now you may have more sub folders than you have models depending on if you've deleted anything or things like that from Capture. But for the most part, every one of these folders is going to be a model in Capture, whether it's a duplicate or the original. We'll get back to that in a little bit. You'll also notice that the names of these sub folders are clearly not what you have your model's named, but you don't want to change the names of these sub folders.

Amir Frank:
It is very important that these names stay as they are. So now you know how to use your iOS device, your iPhone, or your iPad and back everything up using iTunes. But if your computer does not have iTunes, if you're using the later version of Mac iOS, we do have another video that's specific to that and I'll show you how to use just your finder in order to do the same thing. So even without iTunes, you can still use Catalina and Big Sur and future versions of Mac iOS to back everything up using the finder. And if you're on a PC, you still have access to iTunes. It'll be done exactly the same way that I just showed you here.

Amir Frank:
Now let's go ahead and look at just how you back up a specific model. Now you're not going to want to use iTunes for this because you won't be able to. So previously we've used iExplorer and iMazing and those are wonderful tools. However, with the latest version of Capture, I highly recommend using the export feature that's now available instead of using iExplorer. And iMazing. And the reason I say that is because with the export feature, it takes everything that is needed for that model.

Amir Frank:
So for example, if you have a duplicate it's critical that you copy not only the duplicate jobs folder, but also the original jobs folder, and that's exactly what the export feature is going to help you do. So I've got my iPad and I've got Capture open. And basically all that I want to do is go to the menu in the very top left corner and choose help and support. And then all the way at the very bottom you'll notice export jobs and a little beta symbol. So I'll click that and it gives me a list of the different models that I have available. In parentheses there is the number of scan positions that the model has.

Amir Frank:
So I'll just go with the top one. Saratoga and now it says archiving job. You can see this is going to take a little bit of time, but what it's doing is zipping all that information together, every scan position that was captured not only in this, but if I have a duplicate or if this is a duplicate of the original it's going to take all of that that I need in order to keep all of the critical information from this model in one zip file. And then it's going to allow me to upload that. I can upload it to a Dropbox for example. I can transfer it to my computer for example or whatever I want, but it's just going to take everything that I really need and so I don't leave anything behind and that's very, very important.

Amir Frank:
So now you can see that this is done and it created a zip file named Saratoga. It's 592 megabytes. So I'm just going to go ahead and choose to airdrop this. And then it's going to go ahead and transfer that directly to the computer. Of course, I could have chosen to upload it to Google Drive because I do have Google Drive installed on my iPad. If I had Dropbox installed here, that would also be an option.

Amir Frank:
Now let's check out the computer and I'll go to my desktop and you can see, I have the saratoga.zip file right here. If I double-click that it'll expand and extract everything. And if I open that up, I can see all of the scan positions within that folder. And what's nice is that the zip file is actually named the same name as my model in Capture unlike the sub folders.

Amir Frank:
So now what about Android users? Very happy to say that Android users also have a way to not only back up, but also restore using the Capture app. So let's check this out. We've got my Android device and let's go ahead and launch Capture. And again, in the top left corner, I'm just going to go into the menu and help and support. Let's scroll all the way down to the bottom. You have this backup section. It allows me to create a backup. Creating a backup is going to take everything inside Capture and create a zip file from that.

Amir Frank:
Now, the thing is with that is if you're doing that in order to save space on your device, you have to keep in mind that you need as much space outside of Capture that's available on the device as you have in Capture. So for example, if I've got a 64 gigabyte Android device and I've got 40 gigabytes worth of information in Capture, I won't be able to do that because I won't have another 40 gigabytes of space available on my device.

Amir Frank:
So I'm going to skip that for now and I'll just focus on the export jobs feature. So just like with iOS, I can tap export jobs, and then I can choose from the two models that I have in Capture right now. I'll go ahead and choose studio and it's going to export that job. I can choose to save this to my Google Drive account, which is really cool. But if I want to, I can also save it locally on a thumb drive like this. So once I've exported the model that I want it automatically saves that zip file to my documents folder on the Android device. So let's go ahead and check out where you can find that file in order to transfer it to your thumb drive.

Amir Frank:
Let's get out of Capture, I go into files, I go into internal storage, go into documents in Matterport, and then archive. You don't want to go into jobs because jobs is all of the models that you have without being zipped up. So we'll avoid that and we'll just go into archive and here you can see the studio.zip file. I'll just press the little three dots and then choose move.

Amir Frank:
By choosing move instead of copy, I'm going to save that space from sitting on my phone. So I don't want it to stay on my phone. I just want it to be on my thumb drive. So I'll go ahead and choose the XDisk Pro. And now I can just go ahead and press the move here button and that's it. Now I have it on my thumb drive. I can go ahead and unplug this and take this thumb drive to another device in order to import into that device or to my computer or wherever I want in order to back it up.

Amir Frank:
Now, in order to restore everything that you've just backed up or very specific models back into your iOS or Android device, I'm going to leave that for another video.