Safety and Recovery
Losing work is a writer's worst fear, so Writer Studio protects your manuscript with four mechanisms, each covering one kind of loss. They don't overlap — for any situation, exactly one of them is the answer. Because recovery is always within reach, you can restructure, revise, and experiment without fear.
| What was lost | Mechanism |
|---|---|
| Unsaved edits after a crash | Autosave + crash recovery |
| An item you deleted, still recoverable | Trash |
| An earlier version of a scene you still have | Version History |
| The whole project, a catastrophe, or a purged item | Backup |
Autosave and crash recovery
Your text and structure save continuously while you write — there is nothing to remember to do. If the app closes unexpectedly, it reopens where you left off with your latest edits already there. No recovery dialog, no data-loss prompt.
If a save ever fails (a disk error, a locked file), the editor shows a failed-save state and keeps your unsaved text safe and retried — your words are never silently lost, and you can always copy them out.
Trash
Deleting is reversible. When you delete a scene, chapter, part, character, location, plotline, note, image, or the book itself, it moves to the Trash instead of disappearing.
- A trashed item is hidden everywhere — structure, navigation, search, export, and AI context — but it is not gone, and links to it never dangle (a link to a trashed character simply shows as pointing to a deleted item).
- Restore brings it back in one action, exactly where it was.
- Deleting a container takes its contents with it as one unit; restoring brings them all back together.
Open the Trash panel from the activity bar to restore items or permanently delete them.
Permanent delete removes the item, its contents, and the links to it for good. After that, it is no longer in the Trash — it can only come back by restoring a Backup or rolling back the whole project (below). Permanent delete asks you to confirm first.
Version History
Version History is scene-centric: its main use is one scene's timeline of earlier versions, so you can experiment with a passage and step back if you don't like the change.
Open Version History from an open scene. You'll see that scene's earlier versions in time order. For any version you can:
- View it.
- Diff it against the current text to see exactly what changed.
- Restore it — which replaces only that scene's current text. No other scene changes.
The timeline fills in automatically as you write; you can also mark a version with a label at a meaningful moment. Restoring is itself reversible: Writer Studio records the current state as a version first, so you can always return to it.
A scene's version captures the scene's prose along with the scene's own list of present characters and point of view. Restoring reverts the scene's text and that list together, and never edits your character or location cards — your story knowledge stays untouched.
Renaming or moving a scene starts a fresh version timeline for it — its earlier history under the old name no longer shows in the panel (the underlying versions aren't deleted, just no longer linked to the new name).
Whole-project restore is a secondary, advanced path for when you need to return the entire project to an earlier point — including items deleted or purged since then. Because it brings back everything removed after that point and overwrites current work, Writer Studio clearly warns you what it will restore before it runs.
Backup
A Backup is a complete copy of the whole project kept outside the live working state — for disaster recovery, like a disk failure or file corruption. A backup includes your files plus the version history and the current Trash, so restoring from it preserves your history, not just the latest text. It works independently of the app, so a backup taken earlier can rebuild the project even after the working folder is gone.
Backup location and policy are set per device in Settings, since backups and their paths belong to a specific machine.
Destructive operations
The operations that can't be quietly undone — permanent delete, whole-project restore, and any restore that overwrites current text — are always clearly signalled and shown to you for review before they take effect. Everything else (delete to Trash, restoring a version) is safely reversible.
Writer Studio uses plain "versions" — never snapshots or technical version-control jargon. The history is yours, in your words.