What Airtable's CSV export leaves out, and how to get a real copy

"Download CSV" is the export most Airtable users know, and for a quick look at a table in a spreadsheet it is fine. As a backup it is a false sense of security. Here is exactly what it drops, so you can decide whether it is enough for your base.

1. Every other table

The CSV export is per view, which means per table. A base with twelve tables needs twelve exports, done by hand, from twelve different screens, and there is no guarantee they are consistent with each other if the base is being edited while you do it.

2. Hidden fields

The export contains the fields visible in the view you export from. Hidden fields are not included. If someone hid a column in the default view months ago, your "complete" export has been missing it ever since. To export everything you need a view with every field shown, in every table.

3. Field types and options

CSV has one type: text. A checkbox becomes the word "checked" or nothing. A date becomes a string in whatever format the view displayed. A single-select with a defined list of options becomes free text, and the list of allowed options is gone. A formula field becomes its last computed value, with no trace of the formula.

4. Linked records

This is the one that hurts. A linked-record field exports as the primary field text of the linked records, comma-separated. Two customers named "Acme Ltd" in the linked table are now the same string. A link to a record whose primary field is empty exports as nothing at all. The record ids that made the relationship unambiguous are not in the file.

5. Attachments

Attachment fields export as URLs. Since late 2022, Airtable's attachment URLs expire a couple of hours after they are generated. The CSV you saved last quarter contains links to files you can no longer fetch. The files still exist inside Airtable, but the export gives you no way to reach them.

6. Comments and revision history

Neither is in the CSV. If your team uses record comments as a working log, that history is not part of any CSV export.

What a complete export looks like

A copy you could actually rebuild from needs a structured format, not a flat one:

• The schema as data: every table, every field, its type, its options, and for linked-record fields, the id of the table it points to.
• Records with their original record ids, so links resolve.
• Attachments as files on disk, referenced from the record that owns them.
• A manifest saying what is in the archive and when it was taken.

JSON handles the first three naturally. A CSV of each table is still worth including for the people who want to open it in a spreadsheet, as long as it is understood as a convenience view of the real data and not the backup itself.

Getting one

You can build this with Airtable's API and an afternoon of scripting, following the steps in the whole-base export guide. Or paste a read-only token into Tablevault's free export, pick the base, and get exactly that archive by email: schema, JSON and CSV per table, every attachment, one zip. The token is deleted after the run.

Either way, the next time someone asks whether the base is backed up, "we download CSVs sometimes" is not the answer you want to give.