MyFBO Is Shutting Down in August 2026: Back Up Your Data Before It's Gone

After more than 25 years serving general aviation, MyFBO is shutting down in August 2026. For the FBOs, flight schools, and flying clubs that have run their scheduling, billing, maintenance, and curriculum tracking on it for years, that is a hard deadline — and a stressful one. Choosing a replacement platform is a real decision that deserves real thought.

But there is one task that should not wait for that decision, and it is more urgent than choosing a new system: securing your own data. When a hosted platform goes offline, the data inside it does not migrate itself somewhere safe. The export tools, the account login, the database — all of it goes away on the shutdown date. Anything you have not pulled out by then is gone.

The good news is that MyFBO gives you a way to take a complete copy of your operation with you, and it takes minutes. This article walks through exactly how to do it, what you actually get, and how that file becomes the foundation of a clean migration to whatever you choose next.

It is tempting to treat "pick a new platform" and "get my data out" as the same project, sequenced one after the other. They are not, and conflating them is how operators lose records.

Platform selection takes time. You will want demos, internal discussion, maybe a trial run, buy-in from instructors and front-desk staff, and a sense of how billing and scheduling map across. That evaluation can easily stretch over several weeks — and it should, because the wrong choice is expensive to undo.

Your data backup, by contrast, takes minutes and has no downside. A copy of your own operational history sitting on a drive you control costs you nothing and commits you to nothing. Whether you end up on Aviatize, on another platform, or running a hybrid for a while, that file is yours.

The failure mode we want you to avoid is the one where the platform decision drags on, August arrives, and the backup never got taken because it was mentally filed under "do that during migration." Decouple the two. Back up first — today — and decide on a platform on whatever timeline the decision actually needs.

MyFBO includes a built-in database download that produces a backup file with a .bak extension. While your account is still active, you can generate and save it yourself. The process is straightforward:

A .bak file is a database backup, not a tidy spreadsheet — so it is not something you open and read like a PDF. But it contains the substance of how your operation ran. For a typical FBO, flight school, or flying club, that means:

Your fleet. Aircraft records, tail numbers, rates, and the configuration that drove scheduling and billing.

Your people. Members, students, renters, and instructors — contact details, account standing, and the relationships between them.

Training history. Where curriculum tracking was in use, the lesson and progress records that represent years of student development.

Financial history. Account balances, prepaid package and contract standing, invoices, and the transaction trail behind them.

Operational history. Bookings, dispatch and check-in records, and the day-to-day activity that is genuinely hard to reconstruct from memory.

This is exactly the material that is painful — sometimes impossible — to recreate if it is lost. A student's logged progress, a club member's running balance, the history behind a disputed invoice: none of it can be reverse-engineered after the source system is gone. That is why the backup matters even if you have not chosen where you are going yet.

Shutdown dates have a way of arriving faster than expected, and the last weeks of any platform's life are the worst time to be pulling data. As a deadline approaches, more customers log in to do exactly what you are doing — and export tools and servers under heavier-than-usual load are not at their most reliable. If something goes wrong with your download in the final week, you may not have a second chance.

There is also a subtler risk. "I'll handle the data during the migration" assumes the migration starts well before the shutdown. In practice, platform evaluations slip, internal approvals take longer than planned, and the start of training season or a busy maintenance period eats the calendar. The deadline does not move to accommodate any of that.

The rule is simple: take the backup now, while the system is calm and your account is fully functional. Re-take it closer to your actual cut-over date if you want the most current snapshot. There is no penalty for having an extra copy, and there is no recovery from having none.

Once your data is safely in hand, the platform decision can proceed without time pressure on the part that matters most. And the .bak file is not just an archive — it is the starting point for a real migration.

A good migration is not a manual re-typing exercise. Your fleet, your members and students, your instructors, training progress, contract and account balances, and historical bookings should map across into the new system, with a human checking that each field lands where it belongs. The .bak file is what makes that possible: it is the authoritative record of what your operation looked like, and a migration team can work directly from it rather than from screenshots and guesswork.

The quality of the destination platform matters here too. Moving off MyFBO is a chance to fix the things that were workarounds for years — disconnected billing and accounting, web-only access with no real mobile app, manual compliance checks. If you are weighing options, our MyFBO alternative page lays out what a modern, connected platform looks like and how the capabilities you relied on in MyFBO map into it.

If you decide Aviatize is your next home, your MyFBO database backup goes straight to work. We read the .bak file directly as part of migration planning: we review what is in it with you, map each record type into Aviatize, and confirm together what should carry across and how. Fleet and rates, members and students, instructors, training progress, contract and account balances, and historical bookings where the source data supports it.

From there, the rest of the operation comes online: scheduling with real-time availability and student self-booking, connected billing that turns flights into correctly structured invoices automatically, maintenance tracking that locks grounded aircraft out of the schedule, and native iOS and Android apps for students and instructors. Pricing is per aircraft with unlimited users — no per-seat fees as your roster grows.

Every MyFBO account owner who joins Aviatize gets onboarding on us — no deadline, no window to beat — including guided data migration from your .bak file, fleet and user setup, team training, and a dedicated migration contact who knows your plan end to end. You can spin up a free trial in minutes and run Aviatize alongside MyFBO until your team is ready to fully cut over.

If you do nothing else this week, do the first item. The rest can follow on the timeline your operation actually needs.

We have helped operators move onto Aviatize from MyFBO, from other flight school platforms, and from spreadsheets and paper. We know where the surprises are in a migration and what a clean go-live looks like on the other side.

If you are a MyFBO customer planning your move, book a demo and mention you're coming from MyFBO — bring your .bak file, or just bring your questions. Either way, the first step is the one you can take today: get your data into your own hands before August.