Backing up your Confidant data

Confidant doesn't run any backup of its own — there's no cloud bucket, no built-in sync. Your data is files on your computer, so backup is whatever you already do for the rest of your computer.

What to back up

Everything in Confidant's data folder:

• macOS — ~/Library/Application Support/com.confidant.notes/
• Windows — %APPDATA%\com.confidant.notes\

That folder contains:

• The encrypted SQLite database (patients, sessions, transcripts, notes, settings)
• Audio recordings
• Downloaded model files (you can skip these — they're large and re-downloadable)

Built-in OS backups

If you use Time Machine on macOS or Windows Backup, you're already covered — the data folder gets backed up along with the rest of your home directory.

To restore on the same machine and user account, just let Time Machine / Windows Backup put the folder back. Confidant will pick up where it left off.

Cloud backups (Dropbox, iCloud Drive, Google Drive)

You can copy or symlink the data folder to a cloud-synced location, but a few caveats:

• The encrypted database file is locked while Confidant is running. Cloud sync may complain or fail to upload while the app is open.
• The encryption key lives in your OS keychain, not in the data folder. A cloud backup of the database alone is not portable to another machine — you'd need to also export and restore the keychain entry, which most users shouldn't do manually.
• If you absolutely need cross-machine sync, the safer approach is to back up to an encrypted drive and physically move it.

Manual export / archive

For a one-off snapshot:

1. Quit Confidant completely
2. Copy the entire data folder (above) to your backup destination
3. Done

For a clean restore on a new machine, see below.

Restoring on a new machine

This is the harder case because the encryption key is tied to your OS user account. To move Confidant data between machines:

1. Install Confidant on the new machine and complete onboarding (don't add patients yet)
2. Quit Confidant
3. Copy the data folder from your backup over the freshly-installed one
4. Re-launch Confidant — it will fail to open the database because the keychain key on the new machine doesn't match the encrypted file
5. From the error screen, click Reset database and start fresh — this is destructive on the new machine but the original is untouched

In other words: full machine-to-machine migration of an encrypted Confidant database is not something we currently support out of the box. If you need this, contact support — we can walk you through a manual key migration.

What about losing your backup?

If your only copy of the database is corrupted or lost, the data is gone. We can't recover it — we don't have it. The privacy story (nothing leaves the device) cuts both ways.

This is why we recommend at least one backup if your work depends on Confidant.