Taking all your data with you

Help → About → Take all your data with you. One zip containing everything the club holds in Pavilion: every table as a spreadsheet, plus a note explaining what each file is and how they join together.

🔓 Why it is on every plan, and free

Because a club that cannot get its data out is not a customer, it is a hostage. Every committee is entitled to ask what happens if they stop paying, or if we stop supplying the software, and “you can have all of it, today, without asking” is the only answer worth giving. It is on the free plan and it will stay there.

🔐 How it is protected

Being signed in as an administrator is not enough. Three things stand in the way, each aimed at a different way somebody could get at it:

• Type your own password again. This is aimed at the office computer left signed in with the screen unlocked, in a room a lot of people walk through — which at a club is far more likely than anything happening over the internet.
• A one-time link, emailed to the club’s address, good for fifteen minutes. This is aimed at a session copied off a shared tablet: whoever has it still has to reach the mailbox. The link works once, only for the person who asked for it, and forwarding it does not hand the data over.
• Every administrator is told afterwards — who took it, when, and from what address. That prevents nothing, and is arguably the most useful of the three: a thing that cannot be done quietly mostly is not done.

There is deliberately no second password for the club to keep. A passphrase nobody uses from one year to the next ends up on a note in the drawer with the spare keys, which is worse than what it replaced.

📦 What is in it

Start with members.csv — every member with their name and email. Everything else refers to people by the user_id in that file, so it is the key to the rest. Then a file per table: bookings, the rota, payments, the accounts, safety checks, events, guests, lockers, contact notes and the rest.

🧱 It is deliberately raw

The columns are exactly as Pavilion stores them, not tidied into something prettier. A tidied export bakes in today’s idea of what matters and quietly drops the rest; the tables themselves are what another package’s importer, or somebody’s developer in five years’ time, can actually work with. Ugly and complete beats pretty and lossy.

🗓 Worth doing anyway

Not only when leaving. A copy before a big change — a new season, a bulk import, a change of treasurer — costs nothing and has saved more than one club an evening. It is not a substitute for your host’s backups, because it holds the data and not the site, but it is the half that matters most.

Common questions

The link has expired before I got to it.

Ask for another. Fifteen minutes is meant to be enough to walk to a desk and no longer, and a download that fails halfway spends the link too — a live link sitting in a mailbox for a fortnight is exactly what this is guarding against.

Can I forward the link to the treasurer?

No — it only works for the account that asked for it. They can ask for their own if they are an administrator.

Can another system import this?

Most will take a CSV of members straight off. The rest of the files will usually need somebody to map the columns, which is exactly why they are left in their raw shape rather than tidied.

It says the server cannot make zip files.

The PHP zip extension is switched off. Any host will turn it on for the asking. In the meantime the individual exports on each screen still work.

Is anything left out?

Uploaded files — photographs, documents, newsletter attachments — are in the WordPress media library rather than in Pavilion’s own tables, so they come from your host’s backup. Everything Pavilion itself stores is in the zip.

Who can do this?

An administrator. It is the whole of the club’s data in one file, including personal details, so it is not something to leave to every officer account.