I’ve been using Insomnia for testing API calls for a while and have been mostly pleased with it. Today I noticed I was several versions behind and the app no longer seemed to have a Check for Updates option. I went to their site and found new versions.

I made the mistake of just installing the latest version, thinking the upgrade would go smoothly. The new version opened without any of my API request collections. It looked like it found some older collections, but I had to login in order to migrate them. That was frustrating, especially since I’m not using any of their cloud or paid features, but sure, I’ll sign up for an account since you’re holding it hostage.

After entering my email, it told me to enter the verification code they sent me. No email came from them, though. I tried to re-send it and still no dice after waiting for half an hour. I get that this is a nice way to verify the authenticity of an email address, but it’s very frustrating that it prevents me from even using the app. They should at least let people sign in and then prompt to verify the email address as a separate step.

At that point I did what I should have done first 🤣 and searched for issues with upgrading. I was very much not alone. From that thread, I found that several people had downgraded to version 2023.5.8, the last version before version 8, and their collections were restored. I did that and voila, my collections are back! I immediately turned off the preference to automatically download software updates.

I should probably switch to Postman, but also found Hoppscotch.io and httpie recommended as open source options, so I’ll check into those too.