How to Back Up Your Recipe Collection (Before Your App Disappears)
Published July 2026
Quick answer: export your recipes to a plain, boring file you keep yourself — CSV is the safest format, because a spreadsheet from 2026 will still open in 2040. Do it once now and once or twice a year after that. The apps that closed did not give their users years of warning; Yummly announced its shutdown in November 2024 and went dark on 20 December 2024, roughly a month later. If your recipe app has an export button, this is your reminder to press it.
A note on who is writing this: we build Drizzlelemons, an ad-free recipe converter, and we added bulk CSV export in July 2026. So we have an interest here. We have tried to write the guide we would want to read, which means the advice below applies whatever app you use — and includes the parts of a backup our own export does not cover.
What actually happens when a recipe app shuts down
Recipe apps do not usually die dramatically. They get acquired, quietly starved of engineers, and then closed in a single line of corporate housekeeping. Two well-documented cases, a decade apart, show the shape of it.
Yummly, closed December 2024
Yummly launched in 2009 and was acquired by Whirlpool in 2017, having last been valued at around $100 million. In April 2024, Whirlpool laid off the entire Yummly team. The closure was announced in November 2024, and the site and apps went dark on 20 December 2024. From public announcement to switch-off was about four weeks — over a holiday period, when most people were not reading product emails.
ZipList, closed December 2014
ZipList was a recipe clipper and shopping-list tool, launched around 2009, and it was everywhere — hundreds of food blogs embedded its "save this recipe" button, so people's collections were spread across partner sites rather than held in one app. It shut down on 10 December 2014. Users got a limited window to move their data, and ZipList arranged for recipe boxes to be transferred to Epicurious. Better than nothing, but the choice of destination was not theirs.
The pattern in both cases is the same, and it is worth stating plainly: you get weeks, not years, and you do the work under time pressure while the deadline runs. A backup you already have is worth far more than an export button you are told about in a farewell email.
What a real backup looks like
Not every export is a backup. A file that only the app that made it can read is a convenience feature, not an insurance policy. Four things separate the two.
- It is a file on your own storage. Not a cloud sync, not a "your data is safe with us" promise — an actual file in your documents folder or drive, which survives the company that produced it.
- It is readable without the app. CSV, plain text, JSON, or PDF. If you need the original software to open it, your backup has the same single point of failure as the app.
- It is complete. All of it, in one action. An export that does one recipe at a time is not something anyone will do 200 times.
- It is recent enough to matter. A backup from three years ago loses everything you have saved since.
CSV is the pragmatic winner for recipes because it is both machine-readable and human-readable. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers and LibreOffice; it can be re-imported into most other tools; and if every one of those disappears too, it is still just text you can read in Notepad. It has one real weakness, covered below.
How to export every recipe from Drizzlelemons
Bulk export is free on every account — it does not cost a lemon and it is not a paid feature. It takes two clicks.
- Sign in and click your avatar in the top-right corner.
- Choose Export recipes (CSV).
- Your whole collection downloads as a single file named something like drizzlelemons-recipes-2026-07-31.csv. Open it in any spreadsheet app.
You get one row per recipe, including every saved version as its own row directly beneath the original it came from, plus any private notes you have added. It works from your offline copy too, so a patchy connection is not a blocker — though in that case anything saved on another device since your last sync will not be in the file.
What is in the file, column by column
Twenty-three columns, grouped by what they are for.
| Group | Columns | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Title, Version, Version of, Type | Identifies the recipe and shows which rows are variations of which original. |
| Timing and yield | Cooking time, Cooking time (min), Servings, Servings label | The numeric minutes column exists so you can actually sort by "what is quick". |
| The recipe itself | Ingredients, Method, Notes | Full ingredient list and steps in single multi-line cells, plus your private notes. |
| Nutrition | Calories, Protein, Carbs, Fat, Fiber, Sugar, Sodium, Cholesterol, Nutrition basis | Separate numeric columns rather than one blob, so they can be sorted and summed. |
| Provenance | Source URL, Created, Updated | Where a recipe came from, and when you saved or last changed it. |
Two deliberate omissions. There are no internal database IDs, because they are meaningless outside the app and clutter the file. And photos are not included — this is CSV's real weakness, and it applies to spreadsheet exports generally, not just ours. If a recipe's photo matters to you, keep the Source URL column and save the image separately.
How often should you do this?
For most home cooks, twice a year is plenty — the recipes you saved eighteen months ago have not changed, and the cost of losing three months of new saves is one evening of re-finding them. Pick two dates you will remember and attach it to something you already do, like the day the clocks change.
Export more often if any of these apply: you have started developing your own recipes rather than only saving other people's; you cook professionally and your iterations are work product; or the app you rely on has gone quiet — no updates for a year, support tickets going unanswered, a founder posting about "exploring new opportunities". That last one is the strongest signal you will get, and it usually arrives well before the shutdown email.
What if your app does not have an export button?
Check properly first — export is often buried in a settings or account menu rather than shown next to your recipes, and desktop versions sometimes have it when the phone app does not. Paprika, for example, keeps its export under File in the desktop app's menu bar.
If there genuinely is not one, you have three options, in descending order of pleasantness. Ask support — a surprising number of teams will send you a data file if asked, and in the UK and EU you have a legal right to a copy of your personal data in a portable format. Look for a migration tool, since several recipe apps build importers specifically to help people move in. Or, worst case, work through the collection by hand and rebuild it somewhere that does export, which is tedious but finite. Either way, do it before the announcement rather than after.
And when you are choosing the next app, make export a requirement rather than a nice-to-have. We keep an honestly-ranked list of the best recipe apps and a companion piece on recipe apps without subscriptions if you are shopping around.
Frequently asked questions
How do I back up my saved recipes?
Export them from your recipe app to a file you store yourself, ideally as CSV so it opens in any spreadsheet app without the original software. In Drizzlelemons, click your avatar and choose Export recipes (CSV) to download your entire collection at once. Repeat once or twice a year.
Can I export all my recipes at once, or one at a time?
In Drizzlelemons it is all of them in one file, in a single action, including every saved version and your private notes. This matters more than it sounds: a per-recipe export is fine for sharing one dish, but nobody is going to click through 200 recipes individually, which means in practice it never gets used as a backup.
Does exporting my recipes cost anything?
No. Export is free on every Drizzlelemons account and does not spend a lemon. Charging for a copy of your own data would be a strange thing to do, and in the UK and EU the right to data portability makes it a poor idea besides.
What happens to my recipes if a recipe app shuts down?
It depends entirely on how much notice you get and whether an export exists. Yummly gave roughly a month between its November 2024 announcement and closing on 20 December 2024; ZipList gave a limited window in 2014 and arranged a transfer to Epicurious. Neither timeline is long, and both required users to act during it. A backup you already hold removes the dependency completely.
Will my recipe photos be in the export?
No — a CSV is a text format and does not carry images. The Source URL column tells you where each recipe came from, so the original photo is usually still reachable. If particular photos matter to you, save those images separately alongside the file.
Will the file open properly in Excel?
Yes. It is written as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, which is the detail that stops Excel on Windows mangling accented characters — creme brulee and jalapeno arrive intact rather than as gibberish. Ingredients and steps sit in single cells with line breaks, so widen the columns and turn on text wrapping to read them comfortably.
Is a CSV backup enough on its own?
For the text of your recipes, yes — that is the part that is hard to reconstruct and easy to lose. It will not preserve photos, and it is a snapshot rather than a live copy, so anything saved after the export is not in it. Treat it as insurance against the app disappearing, not as a replacement for the app.