Chapter 3 · Where Your Work Lives
Where Your Work Lives: Storage, Autosave, and Versions
Most writing apps keep your manuscript and lend it to you. Skarvia is built the other way round: your Dropbox, your Google Drive, or a folder on your machine holds the real files, and Skarvia keeps a working copy so it can do its job. This chapter explains exactly what is written, where, and when.
The model
Your manuscript's home is your storage. Skarvia writes real files into it as you work, in formats that outlive this application, and holds a working copy on its own side for checks, pagination, and rendering. If Skarvia disappeared tomorrow, your book would still be sitting in your Dropbox in a form you can open.
That is the whole reason the storage question is asked on your first save rather than buried in a settings page nobody visits.
The first-save question
The first time a document saves, a dialog asks "Where should this document live?" with three choices in the Provider list:
- This computer (choose a folder)
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
Choosing a cloud provider you have not connected yet shows a Connect button first; that is a standard OAuth handoff, and the permissions are scoped as narrowly as each provider allows. Once connected, you get a Folder & file name field:
- For Dropbox, the path you type is the path used.
- For Google Drive, the path is inside your My Drive, and Skarvia proposes a
Skarvia/folder by default.
Below the field, a line previews exactly what will be created. Press Save here to commit, or Not now to keep writing and decide later. Answering "Not now" is safe: your work is still held and still autosaved, it simply has no home of its own yet.
What gets written
For a cloud destination, Skarvia writes:
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
title.skarvia.json | The full document, with all its structure, formatting, and metadata. This is the file Skarvia reads back. |
title.txt | Plain text of the same document. No app is required to open it, now or in thirty years. |
.versions/ | A folder beside your document holding its version history. |
title.chapters/ | One plain-text file per detected chapter,
numbered and named (01 - Opening.txt). Renaming or removing a chapter cleans up
its old file rather than leaving orphans behind. |
A folder on your own machine gets the first two, plus .versions/ copies of the
versions you name yourself. The chapter files and the automatic checkpoints are written by the
cloud sync, so a local folder receives the whole document rather than one file per chapter.
Chapter 6 covers the differences.
Your binder structure is mirrored into folders, so parts and seasons appear as folders in Dropbox or Drive rather than as an ordering that only exists inside Skarvia.
Dropbox paths are full paths and must start with a slash, in the form
/My Novel/Chapter 1. They are relative to the app folder Dropbox gives Skarvia, so
that document lands at Apps/Skarvia/My Novel/Chapter 1; see
Chapter 4. Google Drive paths are relative to your My
Drive, and the dialog proposes a Skarvia/ folder for you. In both cases you are
naming the document, not the file: the extensions above are added for you.
Skarvia will not overwrite a file it did not write. If you point a new
document at a path where a .skarvia.json already exists, the push stops and the
document's storage state reads occupied rather than destroying what was there. Choose a
different name or a different folder, and it will sync on the next save.
Saving to this computer
"This computer" uses your browser's folder-access permission and writes the same files into a folder you choose. It needs a browser that supports it: Chrome, Edge, or Brave.
The one thing that catches almost everybody: your browser will not let any website save directly into your Desktop, Documents, or Downloads folder. It treats them as system folders and refuses, usually with a message along the lines of "can't open this folder because it contains system files". Nothing is broken and it is not a Skarvia limitation; every web application lives with the same rule.
The fix: make a dedicated folder and choose that instead. A new folder called "Skarvia" inside your Desktop works fine. Only the Desktop itself is blocked, not its contents. If you would rather not think about it at all, Dropbox and Google Drive save anywhere with no such restriction.
Autosave and the status bar
Autosave runs as you type. There is no save button to remember, and the chip in the status bar shows the current sync state, so you can tell at a glance whether the last few sentences have reached your storage.
⌘S still works. It does not do anything autosave was not already going to do, but pressing it is a reflex worth keeping, and Skarvia acknowledges it rather than swallowing the keystroke.
The status bar also carries a button showing where this document lives, on the right-hand side. That is the same dialog from your first save, reachable at any time.
Versions and checkpoints
Version history has two sources, and you should understand both:
- Automatic checkpoints. The server snapshots a document at most once every ten minutes while it is being worked on, and keeps the twenty most recent automatic checkpoints per document. You do not have to remember anything for this to happen.
- Named versions. Save one yourself whenever a moment deserves a name, from the Versions ▾ menu. "Draft 2 before notes" is worth more than a timestamp six weeks later.
For cloud documents, copies of versions are written into the .versions/ folder
next to your document, so the history is yours as well.
Restoring is not destructive. When you restore an earlier version, Skarvia backs up your current text as a version first. Restoring the wrong one costs you a few seconds, not an afternoon.
When the file changed elsewhere
Because the file is genuinely yours, you can edit it somewhere else: another machine, another editor, a collaborator with access to the same Dropbox folder. Skarvia handles that on open:
- If the cloud copy changed since your last sync, Skarvia adopts it. The newer file wins, which is what "your storage is the home" has to mean.
- If you also had unsynced local edits, those are preserved first as a conflict-backup version before the adoption happens. Both versions survive, and you choose between them in Versions.
Nothing is silently discarded in either direction, with one exception that belongs to the next section.
Zero retention
The storage dialog has a Zero retention checkbox, available for cloud providers. With it on, Skarvia purges its working copy after every successful sync. Your cloud file becomes the only copy at rest, and Skarvia re-fetches the text transiently when you open the document or run a check.
Two consequences to weigh:
- Version history for that document lives only in your
.versions/folder. Skarvia keeps no database copy, which is the point, so do not delete that folder while tidying up. - Everything still works, but each open and each check has to fetch the file first.
- The conflict backup does not happen. When a newer cloud copy is adopted, Skarvia normally preserves your unsynced working copy as a version first. Writing all of your text into a new row at the moment a sync arrives is the thing zero retention exists to prevent, so that snapshot is skipped. Let the status chip read synced before you edit the same document somewhere else.
If you are handling something genuinely sensitive, this is the setting you want. If you are writing a novel and would rather have a safety net you did not have to think about, leave it off.
Changing where a document lives
Open the storage button in the status bar and pick a different provider or path, then Save here. Skarvia begins writing to the new location.
Files already written to the old location stay where they are. Nothing deletes your previous copies, which is deliberate, and it does mean you should tidy up the old folder yourself if you do not want two copies drifting apart.
The neighbouring subject, getting a finished document out as PDF, Word, Final Draft, or Fountain, is Part VIII rather than this chapter. Storage is where the living document sleeps; export is what you hand to somebody else.
Updated 2026-08-13 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?