Backing Up and Restoring Your LangBlitz Progress

LangBlitz does not require an account, and it does not automatically sync your progress to any server. Everything you have studied lives on your device by default. That is good for privacy, but it also means if you lose your phone, reset it, or switch to a new one without doing anything first, your progress goes with it. This guide explains exactly how the export and import feature works, what it protects, and what it deliberately does not.

Why Manual Backup Exists

Some apps handle this problem by requiring an account and syncing everything to a cloud server automatically. LangBlitz takes a different approach on purpose: no login, no account creation, no data leaving your device unless you explicitly choose to export it. This means there is nothing to leak in a server breach and nothing tied to a personal identity, but the tradeoff is that backing up is something you have to actually do, not something that happens silently in the background.

Export and import are premium features. If you are on the free tier and want this safety net before a phone upgrade, it is worth factoring into whether premium makes sense for you, alongside the other features covered in the free versus premium guide.

How to Export Your Progress

In Settings, under the Data section, you will find an Export progress option. Tapping it generates a backup file containing your data and opens your device's standard save dialog, the same kind of screen you would see saving any file on Android, letting you choose exactly where to save it, commonly your Downloads folder or a cloud storage app if you have one installed.

The file itself is a plain text file in JSON format, a widely used, human readable data format. You do not need to understand JSON to use this feature, but it is worth knowing the file is not some proprietary locked format, it is plain text you could technically open and read if you were curious, though there is no need to edit it by hand and doing so could make it unreadable to the app on import.

What Is Included in a Backup

An export captures three categories of data. First, your review history for every word you have studied: which state each word is in, how many times you have reviewed it, how well you have been remembering it, and when it is next due. This is the core of your actual learning progress and the part that matters most to preserve.

Second, your user statistics: your current streak, your best ever streak, whether a streak shield is currently active, and your total review count over time.

Third, your app preferences: your CEFR practice level, your new words per session setting, your theme choice, accessibility settings like the OpenDyslexic font or high contrast mode, text to speech preferences, notification and reminder settings, and similar configuration choices you have made in Settings.

What Is Deliberately Left Out

A few things are intentionally excluded from every export, and this is worth understanding rather than assuming it is an oversight.

Free tier usage counters, like how many word cards you have opened or how many quizzes you have started under the free tier's limits, are not included.

Your premium subscription status is not included either, since it is tied to your Google Play Store account rather than to any file. If you move to a new device, premium status is restored separately through the Restore Purchases option in Settings, tied to your Play Store account being signed in, not through the backup file.

A handful of other values are also excluded: the currently active content version, an internal daily counter that resets naturally every day anyway, and your analytics sharing preference, which is treated as a per device decision rather than something that should carry over silently to a new device without you actively choosing it there too.

How to Import Your Progress

Since import is a premium feature, make sure premium is active on the device first, using Restore Purchases in Settings if you are setting up a new device and have not done so already. Once that is done, go to Settings, find Import progress in the Data section, and select the backup file you previously exported. This opens your device's standard file picker so you can browse to wherever you saved it.

Once you select the file, LangBlitz reads through it and restores everything it contains. You will see a confirmation message summarizing how many words had their progress restored.

What Happens If Something Has Changed

LangBlitz specifically matches restored review history by the word itself rather than only by an internal reference number, which matters in one particular situation: if the app's word library has been updated between when you exported and when you import, for example new words added to the library, your progress still correctly reattaches to the right word rather than potentially landing on the wrong one. If a word from your backup genuinely no longer exists in the current library at all, that specific entry is dropped rather than causing the whole import to fail, and the confirmation message will tell you if this happened for any words.

This matters more than it might sound. Without this kind of check, restoring an old backup after the app's content has changed could, in principle, silently attach your review history to the wrong word entirely. LangBlitz is built to avoid that specific failure mode.

How Often Should You Back Up

There is no automatic reminder built around this, so it is worth building your own habit. A reasonable approach is exporting a fresh backup any time you have put in a meaningful stretch of study you would not want to redo, for example after a particularly productive week, and again right before any planned change to your phone, whether that is a factory reset, a trade in, or simply upgrading to a new device. Because the file is small and the export process takes only a few seconds, there is little downside to exporting more often than you strictly need to. The only real cost is remembering to actually do it, since nothing in the app will prompt you automatically.

If you do use cloud storage to hold onto your exported file, treat that the same way you would any other personal file worth keeping, with whatever backup discipline you already use for photos or documents. The export file itself does not require special handling beyond ordinary care not to lose it.

Restoring an Older Backup

It is fine to import a backup file that is significantly older than your current install, for example one exported months earlier from a previous version of the app. LangBlitz is built to handle this gracefully: your review history restores correctly regardless of how much the app or its word library has changed in between, using the word matching approach described above rather than relying on anything that could drift out of sync between versions. You do not need to worry about exporting and importing only within a narrow window of matching app versions. A backup taken today should still restore cleanly on whatever future version of LangBlitz you are running when you actually need it.

Moving to a New Phone

The practical sequence for switching devices is straightforward. On your old phone, export your progress and save the file somewhere you can access from the new phone, an email to yourself, a cloud storage folder, or a direct file transfer between the two devices. Install LangBlitz on the new phone and complete the placement quiz as normal, since there is no way to skip onboarding. Since import is a premium feature, go to Settings and use Restore Purchases first to reactivate your subscription on the new device through your Play Store account, then go to Import progress and select the file you saved. Your review history, streak, and preferences will be restored.

It is worth doing the export step before you actually need it, meaning before you have already sold, lost, or wiped your old phone, since an export cannot be created retroactively once the data is gone.

Keeping More Than One Backup

If you export regularly, consider keeping more than just the single most recent file rather than overwriting the same one each time. Storage space for these files is minimal, and having a small history of backups from different points in time gives you options if you ever need to go back further than your most recent export for any reason, rather than only ever having access to the latest snapshot.

Related Reading

For the full breakdown of what requires premium, including export and import, see the free versus premium guide. For a fresh installation walkthrough including the placement quiz you will need to complete again on a new device before importing, see Getting Started.