Weekly

Back up your Trello board every week

Each Sunday a full copy of your board, with cards, lists, checklists and comments, lands in your inbox.

Runs: Weekly
Apps: Trello
AI: Not needed
Access: read

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: every Sunday at 10pm, export my Operations board in Trello with its cards, lists, checklists and comments as JSON and email it to me.

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

Trello holds a lot of real work: client onboarding checklists, product roadmaps, content calendars. Yet a board can disappear through a mistaken bulk delete, a departing admin or a closed workspace, and archived items are not always easy to bring back. Few teams keep their own copy, because exporting a board by hand is a menu hunt that nobody schedules.

Every week, this fetches the whole board with its cards, lists, checklists and recent actions, serializes it to JSON and emails it to you as an attachment or a summary with counts. You end up with a dated copy of the board outside Trello.

Teams with compliance needs or a history of accidental deletions get the most out of it. Nobody has to remember to run an export. The copy arrives without anyone having to hunt through menus.

What you get out of it

Recovery path after a mistake
If someone wipes a list or closes a board, you have last week's complete copy. Rebuilding from a file is far less painful than recreating work from memory and chat messages.
Independent of Trello account access
The backup lives in your inbox, not in the workspace. If an admin leaves or an account is locked, you still hold the content of cards, checklists and comments that you need.
A record for audits and handovers
A dated export shows the state of a project at a specific time. That is useful for audits, contract disputes and handing a client project to another team. It is a clear point-in-time record for later review.
Weekly snapshots show change
Comparing two exports reveals which cards were added, moved or removed in a week. That is helpful for investigating an unexplained change on a board with many editors. It helps explain surprising edits.
Counts in the email as a quick check
The summary lists how many cards, lists and checklists were captured. If a number drops sharply from last week, you notice the problem at once, before it becomes a surprise.

How it works

What happens, step by step

Once a week, ClickRuntime downloads your whole Trello board, including its lists, cards, checklists and recent activity.
It saves everything into a single backup file.
You get the backup by email with a count of what it contains, so you always have a recent copy of the board.

Before it runs live

Connect Trello

What you get

RunsWeekly

Back up your Trello board every weektoday, 9:00Succeeded

Email · Trello backupTrello backup: Operations {"name": "Operations", "lists": [...], "cards": [... 64 cards]}

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 Trello 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.

weekly_board_backup_to_email.pyexample

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

BOARD_ID = "OPERATIONS_BOARD_ID"

def trello(method, path, **params):
    params.update(key=credentials.secret("TRELLO_API_KEY"), token=credentials.secret("TRELLO_TOKEN"))
    r = http.request(method, f"https://api.trello.com/1{path}", params=params)
    r.raise_for_status()
    return r.json()

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    board = trello("GET", f"/boards/{BOARD_ID}", lists="all", cards="all", checklists="all",
                   actions="commentCard", actions_limit=1000)
    notify.email_me(f"Trello backup: {board['name']}", json.dumps(board, indent=1)[:95000])
    return {"lists": len(board["lists"]), "cards": len(board["cards"])}

FAQ

Common questions

What is included in the export?

The board's lists, cards with their descriptions, labels and due dates, checklists and recent actions such as comments. Attachments are listed by link rather than copied, so large files stay in Trello. Comments are among the actions kept.

Can I import the JSON back into Trello?

Trello can import its own JSON export through its import tools, though you may need to check the size limits and what gets restored. For most teams the main value is having the content, which you can always read.

Can I back up several boards?

Yes. List each board and you get one export per board, either as separate attachments or in separate emails. Very large boards may be sent as a summary with the file attached because of email size limits.

What permissions does it need?

read. 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.

Daily