How to set up backups on AT Toolbox

Hey everyone, this will be a quick guide on how to set up backups for your account on blacksky, atmosphere, bluesky account or any other PDS provider. AT Toolbox is an iOS app that allows you do actions on your account and in the greater atprotocol ecosystem from iOS shortcuts and has experimental backup support. It backs up your posts, likes, pictures, and preferences locally to your phone and allows you to view them.

I am opening up the TestFlight backup to everyone since I have disabled account backups to the blacksky.app PDS while I fix a bug that was causing too many requests to their PDS and while they also work to provide better performance to their users. These will be turned on again once everything is straightened out, but I hate to leave y'all hanging like this. Some more info from @rude1.blacksky.team in his post

Step 1: Install AT Toolbox from TestFlight

The backups are not yet in the full release of AT Toolbox , so this lets you get access to the beta with backup support as well as get the app for free while pdsmoover.com is going through updates.

Clicking this link https://testflight.apple.com/join/XuM2GEMM should either open TestFlight if you already have it downloaded, or help you download TestFlight to let you download the app.

Step 2: Sign in

Once you install AT Toolbox you will see a screen similar to this, click the plus in the top right to add your account

Enter your handle, like jcsalterego.bsky.social.

Next it will ask you to enter your App Password. This is something you can create in Settings -> Privacy and Security -> App Passwords or at https://bsky.app/settings/app-passwords . It should be noted that this does give access to your account and saves the app password in an encrypted store that never leaves your phone. This may give some pause and they may prefer not to use this app because of that, and that's okay. With the App Password it does give limited access, which blocks things like migrating to a new PDS, but can make or remove posts on your account.

Step 3: Turn on backups

Once you add an account, you should see it in a listing under Accounts.

You can click on it and see a switch for "Enable backups", turn that on to enable backups.

And that's it! AT Toolbox will now download and keep everything on your phone in case you ever need it. You can scroll down and view the contents as well if you would like. Backups run when you open the app or periodically in the background. I've found mine usually run better and more often when my phone is plugged in.

There is not currently an easy end user way to use these raw backups, but you do now have them and I will be adding support to pdsmoover.com so you can BYOB (bring your own backups). It should be noted to fully use these you will need to have a Rotation/Recovery key you got when you migrated your account. If you're curious about how these backups work, you can check out what I wrote about it here