What autosave protects on a Mac
Note My is already looking after your work before you press Save: our auto-recovery safety net covers every tab from the first keystroke, and all of it stays on your Mac. Here is what it protects, what the star on the tab is telling you, and where saving is still yours to do.
You have typed forty lines into a new tab and never pressed Save. The window is not asking you to. Somewhere between "this is fine" and "what happens if the power goes" is a question worth an exact answer: is anything protecting this yet, and if the machine went down right now, how much would be gone?
This page answers that for Note My. The short version: yes, from your first keystroke, and you did not have to arrange it — but autosave is not Save, and the difference matters.
Autosave is not Save
Two different jobs, done for two different reasons, and only one of them changes the file in front of you.
| Autosave | Save (⌘S) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is for | Surviving an unexpected quit | Committing the version you meant |
| Who starts it | Nobody — it is already looking after you | You |
| Changes your file | No | Yes |
| Visible in the Finder | No | Yes |
| Covers a tab you never saved | Yes, from the first keystroke | Save As… asks where it should live |
A new tab creates nothing in the Finder. Press ⌘N, type, and no file exists anywhere you can navigate to — yet what you typed is already protected. Our auto-recovery safety net covers every tab in the window, including tabs that have never been saved. If Note My is force-quit, or the power goes, the next launch brings the session back: the tabs you had open, in the order they were in, and your unsaved text still in them. Work you never saved comes back wearing a leading *. All of it happens on your Mac — nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and your files never leave the machine.
That is the whole feature, and it is already running. What is left for you to do is the part you would want to do anyway: press ⌘S at the version you mean to keep.
What you have to do while you type
Nothing, which is worth saying plainly because most protection asks something of you. Our auto-recovery safety net keeps pace with your typing: nothing to trigger, no indicator to watch, every tab covered at once.
| What you want | Press | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Start something new | ⌘N | An untitled tab, protected from the first keystroke |
| Commit the version you meant | ⌘S | Your file written, and the star gone |
| Choose where it lives | ⇧⌘S | Save As…, for an untitled tab or a file that moved |
| End the session on purpose | ⇧⌘W | Close All Tabs, prompting for unsaved work |
| Reach the backup options | ⌘, | Settings, where the Backup pane lives |
Saving stays the thing you do deliberately. Autosave is for the day something goes wrong; ⌘S is how you say this version is the one you meant. Press it whenever you reach a point you would not want to type again.
Why it is always on
Every tab, in every window, is covered from the first keystroke — on the day you install Note My and on every day after. Nothing to enable on a machine you have just set up, nothing to remember, and nothing that quietly lapses while you are busy.
The same protection is what brings your tabs back after an unexpected quit, with your unsaved text still in them. It also costs you nothing to leave running, because it never writes to the file you are editing: no stray versions on disk, no file changing under a build script, nothing in the Finder you did not put there.
The two backup layers described below are yours to tune, in Settings ▸ Backup (⌘,). Session autosave simply runs, and asks nothing of you.
What pressing ⌘S changes
Saving is what ends the arrangement. ⌘S writes your file and clears the star, and from that point there is nothing left to recover — your own file holds the text. File ▸ Save As… (⇧⌘S) counts the same way.
You do not have to watch for that moment. A save that fails — a full disk, a volume that went away, a file you do not have permission to write — leaves your work protected exactly as it was, and the star stays on the tab until a save has actually gone through. If you are ever unsure whether a save landed, the star is the thing to look at.
⇧⌘W — File ▸ Close All Tabs — is the deliberate end of a session, and it asks once before anything closes: Save All, Discard All or Cancel. Save All writes every starred tab in one pass, so finishing for the day is one keystroke and one answer. Discard All is the one path where letting the unsaved text go is the point, and you have said so on purpose.
Very large documents
A huge log, a database dump, a file nobody meant a human to read: these are the documents an editor is most likely to give up on. Note My opens them, and our large-file engine keeps them scrollable, searchable and editable. The status bar tells you when you are in a large document, so you always know which kind of file you are working in, and the things you would reach for in a short note — our find and replace among them — are exactly where you left them.
Protection carries on in a document that big: our auto-recovery safety net covers the tab exactly as it covers a short note, so an unexpected quit two hours in does not put you back to your last save. The star on the tab, ⌘S and the session waiting for you at the next launch all behave exactly as they do in a two-line scratch file.
What comes back
What our auto-recovery safety net hands back is what was on your screen a moment ago, not what you had at your last save. The distance between those two things is the sentence you were in the middle of rather than the hour you have been working — the difference between a shrug and a bad afternoon.
- Text you have typed: covered, in every open tab, including tabs never saved to disk.
- Work you deliberately discarded: treated as the decision you made. Don't Save, and Discard All when you close a window, do exactly what you asked of them — each after putting the question to you first, and Don't Save still leaves you a few seconds to change your mind.
- The file on disk: untouched until you save it. Nothing here rewrites a file behind your back.
So the working habit is the boring one: press ⌘S at a version you would not want to type again, and let the net cover the minutes in between.
Autosave never touches the file on disk
Nothing described above writes to your file. That is what makes it safe to leave running while a script watches the directory, while a build is running, or while you are editing a config that something else reads.
Two further layers do concern the file, and they are separate features with their own settings:
- Back up the previous version on save. On by default. Each ⌘S keeps a copy of what your file held before you overwrote it, in Note My's own private storage rather than beside the file. How many earlier versions are kept, how long they stay, and how large a document to include are all yours to set in Settings ▸ Backup.
- Snapshot open documents periodically. Also on by default, and it covers untitled tabs you have never saved. How often, and how many are kept per document, are adjustable in the same pane.
After an unclean exit, documents that were open when it happened are reopened automatically as *filename tabs. The work is simply back when the window appears, in the tabs and the order it was in, ready for you to carry on from the line you were on.
What the star on the tab tells you
A leading * on a tab title, and in the window title, means the same thing everywhere: this tab holds text that is not in the file yet, and it is being looked after. Save and the star goes.
The orange dot on a tab is a different signal. It means the file changed on disk, not that you have unsaved edits. The unsaved marker is the star, and only the star.
One star is the whole signal, and it means the same on a file you have edited all morning as on a scratch tab from a minute ago. If one is still showing as you go to close the window, that is the moment to stop and look.
How private your unsaved work is
It stays on your Mac, in Note My's own private storage rather than next to your file. It does not appear in a Spotlight result, a Quick Look preview or a search across your home folder, and the filenames give nothing away about what you were working on.
Protected work stays in Note My's own private storage on your Mac and travels nowhere else, so the boundary around it is the boundary around your machine. Keep FileVault on and lock the screen when you step away, and your unsaved text is looked after to the same standard as the files it came from.
Nothing is uploaded. Note My contains no networking code of its own; the only network activity is performed by Apple’s own system services, to establish purchases and transactions state. There is no telemetry, no crash reporter and no update check, and no account, so protected work has nowhere to go but your own disk.
Troubleshooting
I relaunched and my work did not come back
Check first whether the document had actually been changed. One you only opened and read has nothing to bring back, because your file already holds every character in it. If the tab you are missing was never saved, look along the tab bar for a title with a leading star: recovered tabs are put back among the rest, in the position they had while you were working.
The tab title reads "(missing)"
The original file is no longer where it was — moved, renamed outside the app, or deleted. The tab is kept with its text intact but detached from disk, and ⌘S opens Save As instead, so you choose a new home rather than writing to a path that no longer means anything.
The star will not clear
The star clears on a successful save. If it persists, the save did not complete — a read-only location, a volume that went away, or a folder Note My has not been given permission to write to. Use File ▸ Save As… (⇧⌘S) and pick the destination yourself in the panel: choosing it there is what grants the permission. Your text stays in the tab throughout, so you can try more than one location without losing anything.
The disk filled up while I was typing
Your text stays in the tab in front of you, and the star stays with it until a save has actually landed — so the thing to do is clear some room on the volume, then save. If the full volume is the one your file lives on, ⇧⌘S puts the document somewhere with space instead: an external disk, another volume, a folder on the drive that still has room. The tab carries on from wherever you send it, with everything you typed while the disk was full still in place.
I clicked "Don't Save" by mistake
You have a few seconds to change your mind. Closing a tab with Don't Save drops a small panel at the bottom of the window reading "Discarded «Foo.swift» — restore?" with a Restore button. Click it and the tab comes back with its content. Let it lapse and the discard stands: you were asked, and you answered. The file on disk is untouched either way.
I want to look through my earlier versions
Keep the ones that matter as files of your own, and they are ordinary documents you can open, rename, compare and archive however you like. File ▸ Save a Copy As… (⌥⇧⌘S) drops a second file on disk in seconds without disturbing the tab you are working in, so you keep typing where you were. Do that at each point worth coming back to — before a risky refactor, at the end of a draft, the afternoon a config finally works — and the trail is yours, named and filed the way you want it. Open two of those copies together and our comparison view marks what moved between them, line by line, so you can see a week of edits at a glance. Recovery after a crash is a separate matter and needs nothing from you at all: the work is already in front of you at the next launch.
Getting the most out of it
The protection runs itself. These are the habits that turn it into something you can rely on without thinking about it.
- Save at the moments you would mind retyping. ⌘S is how you say this version is the one, and it takes a fraction of a second. The safety net covers everything between those presses.
- Start rough work in a new tab. ⌘N creates nothing in the Finder, and the tab is protected from the first keystroke — so a throwaway idea is looked after exactly as well as a file you have kept for a year.
- Read the tab bar before you close the window. One glance for a leading star tells you whether anything is still waiting to reach disk, and ⇧⌘W prompts you for whatever is.
- Leave the backup layers on. Both are on by default, and between them they hold the version your file had before your last save and periodic snapshots of everything open, untitled tabs included.
- Keep milestones as real files. File ▸ Save a Copy As… (⌥⇧⌘S) is the quickest way to put a version somewhere you will find it again months later.
Frequently asked questions
Is autosave always on?
Yes — every tab, in every window, from the first keystroke, with nothing to switch on. It costs you nothing to have running, because it writes only to Note My's own private storage on your Mac and never to the file you are editing.
How often does it save?
As you work, without you having to ask for it. Our auto-recovery safety net keeps pace on its own in every open tab, so an unexpected quit costs you seconds of typing at worst rather than the hour since your last save. The periodic backup copies of your open documents are a separate layer with a rhythm of their own, set in Settings ▸ Backup.
Does autosave overwrite the file I opened?
Your file changes only when you save it. Autosave writes to Note My's own private storage and never to the file you opened, and a new tab creates nothing on disk until you choose where it should live.
How much of my typing comes back?
What was on your screen a moment ago, rather than what you had at your last save — so an unexpected quit costs you a sentence rather than a session. Pressing ⌘S at the versions you mean to keep is still the habit worth having.
Does saving clear the protected copy?
Yes, and that is right — the text is in your own file now. Answering Discard All as you close a window clears it too, because that is a decision you made deliberately, in a sheet that asked you first. A save that does not succeed changes nothing, and the star stays on the tab until one does.
Does any of this need an internet connection?
It all happens on your Mac, online or off — autosave, the backup layers and the recovery you get at the next launch. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and your files never leave the machine.
Can someone else read what has been autosaved?
It stays out of Spotlight results, Quick Look previews and a search across your home folder, and the filenames give nothing away about what you were working on. It lives on your Mac and travels nowhere else, so the boundary is the one around your machine: with FileVault on and the screen locked, unsaved work is as private as the files it came from.