What it does
File Backup copies every file in your connected sub-accounts into cloud storage tied to your account, and writes a manifest saying which contact, opportunity, conversation or submission each file came from. It covers:
- Files in contact and opportunity custom fields
- Conversation attachments, call recordings and voicemails
- Form and survey uploads, including ones that never landed on a contact field
- The media library
- Documents and contracts, including signed agreements
Run it once by hand, then put the whole agency on a monthly schedule.
Why it matters
GoHighLevel's contact export gives you a CSV of contact data. It doesn't give you the bank statements, signed contracts, IDs, call recordings and attachments that live inside those contacts. For agencies serving lenders, contractors or anyone collecting documents, the files are often the most valuable thing in the account, and they're the one thing you can't download in bulk natively. What GoHighLevel's CSV export leaves out goes through the gap item by item.
Downloading by hand means opening each contact and saving each file. That's impractical past a few dozen contacts, and it gives you a folder of files with no record of who they belonged to.
How it works
- Open Backup & Insights and add sub-accounts, one at a time or Add all connected.
- Open Backup schedule. Choose which sources the monthly backup copies, and which ones Back up uses when you run it by hand.
- Press Back up on a sub-account to run it now. The list shows status, file count and size, with live progress ("6,420 of 9,118 contacts read").
- Set the monthly schedule: turn on Back up every month, pick a day (1–28) and hour, and choose Only what changed or Everything again.
- Optionally tick Add new sub-accounts first so anything newly connected is picked up.
- Check Files that couldn't be saved on any sub-account, and use Try failed files again.
Good to know
- Incremental by default. Monthly runs copy only contacts changed since the last finished backup.
- Jobs resume. A stopped or interrupted backup picks up where it left off.
- Rate limits. HighLevel allows 200,000 requests per sub-account per day. A full backup of a big account can reach that; the job waits for the reset and continues on its own.
- Paused sub-accounts. If HighLevel blocks access because a sub-account is paused or turned off, it's left out of the monthly backup until you turn it back on.
- Nothing is deleted in GoHighLevel. Backups only read.
- Getting files out is covered by Zip Downloads and Share Links. Finding one file fast is Master Search.
- Upload dates. An optional source looks up when each file was uploaded, which feeds the monthly upload charts in Document Analytics.
- Your storage, your manifest. Every file is recorded with where it came from, so the backup lines up with the contact CSVs you already export.
Questions
Which files does Backup & Insights back up?
Contact and opportunity file fields, conversation attachments and call recordings, form and survey uploads, the media library, and documents and contracts. You choose which sources each backup copies.
What if a file can't be downloaded?
Some old links expire at the source, like carrier MMS images. Those are marked gone at source, and other failures are listed with the reason and can be retried.
Does a big backup hit HighLevel's API limits?
It respects them. If a sub-account uses its 200,000 daily requests, the backup pauses, keeps its place and carries on by itself after the reset.