Weekly

Export your Sanity dataset every week

Each Sunday an export of your dataset is taken and you get an email confirming what it covers.

Runs: Weekly
Apps: Sanity
AI: Not needed
Access: Viewer

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: every Sunday at 2am, export my Sanity production dataset and email me a summary of the export with the number of documents in it.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

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First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

Content in Sanity feels safe because it lives in a hosted service, yet a mistaken bulk mutation, a script that patches the wrong field, or a deleted dataset can still destroy months of editorial work. Teams that rely on Sanity as the source of truth for a website often have no copy outside it. Sanity keeps history for documents, but restoring a whole dataset after a faulty migration is a stressful, slow exercise when there is no export to start from.

Once a week the automation calls Sanity's export endpoint for your dataset, compresses the result, and emails you a summary with the link or attachment. You end up with a dated archive of every document and asset reference. It requires no one to run the CLI. Agencies and small product teams use it as a simple, regular safety copy.

What you get out of it

Recovery from a bad migration
If a script overwrites a field across thousands of documents, last week's export lets you compare and restore the original values. Without it you reconstruct content from the website's cache, if you can.
Content survives account or access problems
An export sitting in your mailbox does not depend on Sanity account access, a project deletion or a billing issue. That is the kind of independence that matters when the unexpected arrives.
Easy move to a new dataset
Teams often create a staging or new production dataset from a recent export. Having regular files means that task takes minutes rather than needing someone to remember the CLI command.
Handover and compliance copies
When an agency hands a site to a client, or legal asks for a record of published content on a given date, a dated export answers the request without a rushed manual job.
Weekly cadence matches editing pace
Most content teams change enough in a week to matter but not in a day. A weekly export means you lose at most a week of changes in a worst-case scenario.

How it works

What happens, step by step

Every Sunday, ClickRuntime takes a full export of your Sanity dataset.
It counts the documents in the export by type.
You get an email confirming the export, with the total and a count per type.

Before it runs live

Connect Sanity

What you get

RunsWeekly

Export your Sanity dataset every weektoday, 9:00Succeeded

Email · Sanity exportSanity export: 2,184 documents in production post: 912 · product: 640 · author: 38 · sanity.imageAsset: 594

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.

Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
Combine it with other Sanity steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.

dataset_backup_email.pyexample

from collections import Counter
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, notify
import json

PROJECT_ID = "your-project-id"
DATASET = "production"

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    token = credentials.secret("SANITY_TOKEN")
    resp = http.get(f"https://{PROJECT_ID}.api.sanity.io/v2021-06-07/data/export/{DATASET}",
                    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {token}"}, timeout=120)
    resp.raise_for_status()
    docs = [json.loads(line) for line in resp.text.splitlines() if line.strip()]
    types = Counter(d.get("_type", "unknown") for d in docs)
    lines = [f"{t}: {n}" for t, n in types.most_common(15)]
    notify.email_me(f"Sanity export: {len(docs)} documents in {DATASET}",
                    f"Exported {len(docs)} documents ({len(resp.content) // 1024} KB).\n\n" + "\n".join(lines))
    return {"documents": len(docs)}

FAQ

Common questions

Does the export include images and files?

The standard dataset export can include assets if requested, but the large files make the archive heavy. Many teams export documents only, which holds references to asset IDs, and keep assets in Sanity's own storage.

How big can the exported file get for email?

Sanity datasets with many documents can produce large archives. The automation compresses the file and, if it exceeds email limits, sends a link or a summary of size and document count rather than the full attachment.

Can I back up a private dataset?

Yes. A private dataset needs a read token with access to it, which ClickRuntime stores as a secret. Create a token in your Sanity project settings with read permission and give it to the automation during setup.

What permissions does it need?

Viewer. Nothing else in your accounts is used.

Does it need AI?

No. It runs without AI, so it doesn't use your plan's AI allowance.

How many runs does it use?

One run each time it runs (weekly). Checks that find nothing to do and stop right away aren't counted.

Can I change how it works?

Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

Weekly