Chapter 6 · Where Your Work Lives
Saving to a Folder on Your Own Machine
"This computer" points a document at a folder on the machine you are sitting at. No cloud account, no upload, no round trip: your browser writes real files into a folder you chose, as you type. It is the most direct version of Skarvia's arrangement, and its rules come from your browser rather than from us.
Who does the writing
With Dropbox or Google Drive, Skarvia's server pushes the files. With a local folder, the browser tab you are writing in is the only thing that can reach your disk, so the tab does the writing itself. Two consequences follow.
The good one: writing to your folder needs no network. The file is written on every autosave, before the save to Skarvia is even attempted. Work through an outage and the copy in your folder stays current throughout.
The awkward one: only that browser, on that machine, with permission still granted, can write those files. Close the tab and nothing writes. A document that follows you between machines belongs in Dropbox or Google Drive instead.
Which browsers can do this
Local folder access needs a browser that supports it: Chrome, Edge, or Brave. Anywhere else the This computer (choose a folder) option in the storage dialog is greyed out and cannot be selected. Safari and Firefox get the cloud providers, which work everywhere.
Choosing the folder
The storage dialog, "Where should this document live?", appears by itself the first time a document needs a destination, and the button on the right of the status bar reopens it at any time. Then:
- Set the Provider list to This computer (choose a folder). The panel that appears says what will be written.
- Press Save here. Your browser's own folder picker opens.
- Choose or create a folder, and grant the permission your browser asks for.
Skarvia records the folder's name, which is all a browser will tell a website. The permission is kept by the browser and remembered per document, so two documents in one project can live in two different folders and each reopens with its own. Closing the picker without choosing anything cancels quietly and leaves the destination as it was.
The folders your browser refuses
This is the step that catches almost everybody. Your browser will not let any website have write access to your Desktop, Documents, or Downloads folder. It treats them as system folders, and the picker either refuses to hand them over or reports that the folder contains system files. Skarvia responds with a message explaining the rule, and nothing is changed.
The fix takes ten seconds: create a folder and choose that instead. A new folder called "Skarvia" inside your Desktop is fine. Only the Desktop itself is blocked, never its contents. Your home folder is refused on the same grounds. No setting on our side can lift this, because it is not ours to lift.
What gets written, and what does not
Inside the folder you picked, using your document's title as the base name:
| File | What it is | Written when |
|---|---|---|
title.skarvia.json | The complete document: text, structure, formatting, production marks, settings. | Every autosave |
title.txt | Plain text of the same document, openable by anything, forever. | Every autosave |
.versions/ | A copy of each version you name yourself, filed as
title-timestamp-name.skarvia.json. | When you save a named version |
Characters no file system accepts in a name (\ / : * ? " < > |) are stripped
out, so What Now? is written as What Now.skarvia.json. The
.versions folder begins with a dot, so most file managers hide it until you ask them
to show hidden files.
Two things a cloud destination gets that a local folder does not. Automatic checkpoints are taken on Skarvia's side and are not copied to disk; only versions you name yourself are. Per-chapter text files are produced by the server's push, so a local folder receives the whole document rather than one file per chapter. Both remain available through the Versions menu and through export.
Renaming a document changes the base name, and the next autosave writes a fresh pair of files under the new name. The old pair stays where it is. Skarvia never deletes files from your disk, which is the behaviour you want the day you rename something by accident, and it does leave an occasional tidy-up to you.
Reading the status bar
The storage button at the right of the status bar is the honest answer to "is this on my disk". For a local document it reads Saved on this computer, a mark, then the folder name:
| Mark | Meaning |
|---|---|
✓ | The last autosave reached your folder. |
… | A write is in flight or has not happened yet. |
✗ | The write failed. See the banner at the top of the editor. |
| click to re-authorize | Folder permission is dormant. See below. |
When a write fails, a banner appears above the manuscript with a Choose a folder button. The usual cause is a folder your browser has decided it will not allow, so the repair is to pick a different one.
Re-authorising after a restart
Browsers deliberately let folder permission go dormant when you quit them, and they restore it only in response to a click you make yourself. Skarvia remembers which folder each document belongs to across restarts, so permission is the only thing missing.
Click the storage button in the status bar. Your browser asks whether to let the site edit files in that folder again. Approve it and Skarvia saves the current text into the folder at once, then checks whether the copy on disk moved on while you were away.
If the browser has forgotten the folder entirely, which happens when you clear site data, use a different browser, or open the document on another machine, the same click opens the storage dialog so you can pick a folder again. Nothing was lost meanwhile: Skarvia's own copy carried on saving normally.
Two documents, one name
Every new document starts life called "Untitled", so two of them pointed at one folder would
otherwise write over each other. Before writing, Skarvia reads the .skarvia.json
already sitting there and checks which document created it. If the file belongs to a different
document, the write stops and the status bar shows ✗.
This is the local counterpart of the occupied state a cloud destination reports, and the answer is the same: give one of the two documents a real title, or point it at a different folder. Skarvia neither overwrites the file nor adopts it.
When the file on disk is newer
Because the files are genuinely yours, you can restore one from a backup or edit it outside Skarvia. Open a document whose file on disk was saved more recently than Skarvia's copy and you are asked whether to load the local copy. Say yes and the file becomes the document; say no and nothing changes.
You are only asked about a file this document wrote. One belonging to a different document is never offered, because loading it would replace your manuscript with someone else's chapter.
What Skarvia still holds
A local folder does not make a document invisible to Skarvia. Autosave still saves to the server, and it has to: the fact-checker, the continuity editor, and every export run against Skarvia's working copy, and none of them can reach your disk. Version history and share links live there too.
For the same reason, zero retention is not offered for a local folder. The checkbox is hidden while "This computer" is selected, and switching a document from a cloud provider to a local folder turns the setting off. If purging Skarvia's working copy is what you need, that setting lives with Dropbox and Google Drive, and Where Your Work Lives covers what it costs you.
There is one more copy you never asked for. Your text is written to a private store inside the browser before anything else is attempted, so if a save fails and you reload the page, a bar offers the unsaved work back with Restore them or Discard.
Version history, checkpoints, and restoring an earlier draft are the neighbouring subject and get their own chapter next. Getting a finished document out as PDF, Word, or Final Draft is Part VIII.
Updated 2026-08-13 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?