Your Data

Lino is a local-first app. Every change you make is written to a database on your own computer before anything else happens, and sync is a copy of that — not the other way round. This page is the full account: where the file is, what happens offline, how two devices settle an edit they both made, and how to get everything out.

Where your work is stored

Your library lives in a single SQLite database on your machine, one per account you sign in as:

• macOS — ~/Library/Application Support/Lino/users/<account>/lino.db
• Windows — %APPDATA%\Lino\users\<account>\lino.db

Images, link previews and other files you bring in sit next to it in the same folder. Nothing in there is locked to Lino: it is an ordinary SQLite file, and the export below turns it into plain JSON whenever you want.

The local database is not separately encrypted. It is protected the way the rest of your documents are — by your operating system's disk encryption, which we recommend turning on: FileVault on macOS, BitLocker on Windows.

Working offline

The network is never in the way of an edit. Dragging a card, typing in one, drawing, editing a table — each of those writes a row to the local database in about a millisecond, with no round trip to anywhere.

While you are signed in but offline, those changes queue up on disk. Closing the app, restarting the machine or losing power does not empty that queue: it is part of the database, not something held in memory. The next time Lino is online, the queue goes up in order.

Sync, and what happens when two devices disagree

Signing in adds sync. Your canvases are copied through our servers so your devices agree with each other; each account's rows are isolated from every other account's by row-level security in the database. Traffic is encrypted in transit, and the cloud copy is encrypted at rest.

This is not end-to-end encrypted. Your work is readable on our servers in the same sense that it is readable in any hosted app. We do not read your canvases, and we do not use your content to train models — but we would rather say that plainly than claim a guarantee the architecture does not make.

When the same card, table or sketch is edited on two devices — say both are offline for an afternoon — Lino settles it per object, not per file:

1. The later edit wins and becomes what you see on both devices.
2. The edit that lost is not discarded. It is kept as a version of that object, and the device that lost tells you once that this happened.
3. You open the version history on that object, look at both, and keep whichever you meant.

That holds whichever device reconnects first. The version that gets overwritten is preserved either way.

Version history

Cards, tables and sketches keep their own history:

• A version is saved when you start editing after a pause, before the AI agent changes something, and whenever a sync conflict has to keep the losing copy.
• Versions travel with your account, so the history of a card is there on your other computer too.
• Open one from the object's right-click menu — View history — to see what a restore would change before you commit to it. Restoring is an ordinary edit, so ⌘Z undoes it.

Recently deleted

Deleting something is not immediate destruction. For 30 days it sits in the Deleted filter of the artifacts gallery, with its preview, its name and a note of how many days remain.

To bring something back, drag it from there onto a canvas. It returns with the connections it had to things that still exist. Its old positions do not come back — it lands where you drop it — so putting one card back never scatters copies across canvases you had forgotten about.

Backups

Three separate things, and they fail in different ways, which is the point:

On your machine. Lino backs your library up once a day and keeps the last seven. In Settings → Data & Import → Backups each one is listed by date and size, and Restore to this day puts your whole library back to how it was then. Anything you made after that day is not destroyed; it moves to Recently deleted, so a restore you did not mean is itself reversible. Before restoring, Lino takes one more snapshot of the current state.

Export all. The same panel has Export all, which writes one zip: a library.json with everything in it, plus the images and files that library refers to. Do this before a machine migration, or whenever you want a copy that does not depend on us.

Our servers. If you are signed in, your work is also on our servers, which are backed up daily with seven days kept.

What to do if something goes wrong

| What happened | Where to look | |---|---| | Deleted something by accident | Artifacts gallery → the Deleted filter, within 30 days | | A card or table is wrong after an edit | Right-click the object → View history | | An edit made on another device replaced yours | Same version history — the copy that lost is in there | | A bad afternoon you want to undo wholesale | Settings → Data & Import → Backups → Restore to this day | | You want your material outside Lino | Settings → Data & Import → Backups → Export all | | Something will not sync | The same settings page lists anything the cloud refused, with a Retry |