Skip to main content

I am doing an individual trial of Lucidchart in an attempt to try it out for our company. I have also reviewed Visio. In the same way that one can download a Visio diagram as a visio file type and save on the hard drive is there the ability to download a Lucidchart diagram as a Lucidchart file type? The benefit of this I'm thinking would be to provide extra back up or  in the event someone leaves the company without "Sharing" a particular diagram with others it would be able to accessed and wouldn't have to be recreated. In addition if we were to stay with an individual license instead of a Team this would enable one to manage their own versioning by downloading and saving different versions of a diagram (revisions/versioning only available with Team or greater license I believe).

Hi Martha thanks for posting! Although individual Lucidchart documents can't be downloaded as a Lucidchart (.LAF) file you can use our backup and restore feature to download all of your documents. If you sync your Lucidchart account with Google Drive you can also choose to schedule weekly automatic backups of all your documents to a .LAF file in Drive. Please check out this section of our Transfer Files article for more details on backup/restore and this article for more info on Google Drive backups. 

With regards to version management you're correct that our revision history feature is only available to Team or Enterprise accounts. As an alternative you can duplicate a document in your account and rename it to keep track of your versions (e.g. Doc v1 Doc v2 and so on). There are some downsides to this method: 1. You would need to remember to duplicate and rename the document to control the versions and 2. multiple versions would take up storage space in your account. 

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.


We keep all our documentation under version control and I consider the ability to download the chart as a Lucidchart file to be a pretty essential feature!


Hey Jonathan


Thank you for keeping this thread going! As Emma mentioned you can certainly download Lucidchart files as a .LAF type by utilizing our Backup and Restore feature while also utilizing Revision History or duplication of the document to ensure you have each iteration of your document. 


Thanks again for the comment! Please let us know if you have any questions -- Cheers 🍻


Hi Phillip


I tried the backup feature today but it seems to backup all of my charts into a single .LAF file.  I would need to be able to download individual charts in a native lossless format so that I can include them with our other documentation under version control.


I've created a feature request for this but looking at other comments it seems people have been waiting for years for this feature. :(  


Best Regards


Hey Jonathan


Oh I see how this is different -- thanks so much for filling out the feature request form! This is the best way to reach out to our devs directly and let them know you'd like to see this functionality in the future. 


Thanks again for giving us a peak into your workflow and how we can best assist you -- firm handshake!


Reply