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.

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, or image, it moves to the Trash instead of disappearing. A whole book or project does not go to this Trash; see Deleting a whole book or project.

• 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.

Deleting a whole book or project

A whole book or a whole project is deleted from the start screen, not from inside the project. Its folder moves to the system Trash — your operating system's own (the Trash on macOS, the Recycle Bin on Windows) — not to the Trash inside Writer Studio.

1. Close the project to reach the start screen.
2. Choose Delete book on the book's tile, or Delete project on the project's entry.
3. Type the title exactly as it is shown — capital letters and spaces count, and you can paste it — then confirm. Cancel is the default.

The folder moves to the system Trash at once. Nothing waits inside Writer Studio, and Writer Studio has no action that brings back just that book or project.

To get it back, restore the folder from the system Trash to its original place, using your system's own command. A restored book is back in its project; open a restored project with Open Project. The system Trash can be emptied at any time, by you or by the system, so do not rely on it for long — a Backup taken earlier is the dependable way back, and a deleted book also returns when you restore the whole project to an earlier point.

If the folder cannot be moved to the system Trash — for example, the drive has none — Writer Studio shows an error and deletes nothing. It never deletes a book or a project permanently instead.

When you delete a book, everything in the book's folder moves with it, its images included. Its history and issues that the project keeps outside the book's folder stay in the project. They return with the book when you restore it to its original place, and they never attach to a new book, even one with the same title.

Removing a project from the list on the start screen is a different action: it only forgets the project on this device and never touches its files.

You can delete any book, including the last one in a project. A project with no books shows No books on the start screen and offers Create book, which creates a new book and opens the project on it. The AI assistant cannot delete a book or a project.

If a folder is moved or deleted outside Writer Studio

A book's folder or the project folder can be moved or deleted in your file manager, or by a sync app, while the project is open. Writer Studio notices the next time you open, save, or change something in the book, and tells you what happened.

If your changes cannot be saved because the folder is gone, no other book opens and the project stays open: the text stays in the open items while Writer Studio is running, where you can keep editing and copy it. The save message names the missing folder and says what to do — put the folder back where it was and retry, or copy the text somewhere else. If you quit at this point, Writer Studio stops and asks first: Return to Writer Studio is the default, and Quit without saving loses that text.

When the project closed, put the folder back where it was, or reconnect the drive, then choose Open Project on the start screen and select the project folder. A project left with no books can also be entered with Create book.

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.

A scene's timeline follows the scene itself, not its name or its place in the book. Renaming a scene or moving it to another chapter keeps its whole history in the panel: versions written under an earlier name, or in an earlier place, stay visible and can still be restored. Reorganize as freely as the book needs.

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.

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See also: Search | Structure | Settings | Export