Where your words live

A project is a folder of plain files. Here is what is in it.

The folder

A project with some work in it looks like this:

The Ferry/
  project.json        the title, labels, statuses, synopses, compile
                      settings and project dictionary
  Manuscript/         the book, in order
    01 Part One/
      01 Arrival.md
      02 Salt.md
  Research/           characters, places, notes
  Trash/              what you deleted, until you empty it
  history/            snapshots
  .bakspace/          working data the app can rebuild

Every document is a plain Markdown file named after its title. In the manuscript the names start with a number, which is how the order is kept. Images you add to a document sit beside it in the same folder, with their own names. Open the folder in Finder or Obsidian and the book reads in order.

Edit a file there while the project is open and Bakspace picks the change up, as long as you have nothing unsaved in that document. A project folder often ends in .bakspace, but it does not have to; what makes it a project is the project.json inside.

.bakspace/ holds a record of each file as Bakspace last saw it. Deleting it loses none of your words. The one cost: if files were moved or renamed while Bakspace was closed, it may not be able to tell which synopsis, label and status belonged to which file, and lists those under Lost their file for you to sort out.

Saving

There is no save command. Every edit is written to disk a moment after you make it, and every write goes to a temporary file first and is then renamed into place, so a crash or a power cut leaves the previous version whole rather than half a file.

Moving and copying

The folder is self-contained. Move it, rename it, copy it to a USB stick, put it in a synced folder, then open it again with File > Open Folder.

• To write on more than one computer, put the folder in iCloud Drive or Dropbox. On your other computers says how.
• If something else changes a document while you have unsaved words in it, Bakspace never writes over the other version. Yours is saved beside it as a conflict copy, and Bakspace tells you where. See Troubleshooting.

Backups

Because a project is a folder, anything that backs up folders backs up Bakspace: Time Machine, a cloud backup service, a copy on another disk. Snapshots inside the folder go with it.