Your Memory Is a Folder

Plenty of products tell you "your data belongs to you" and then lock it in a format only they can read. We don't think promises count — ownership is not a promise, it's a format. Previously's memory is an ordinary folder at ~/Documents/Previously: plain Markdown that any editor can open. You can read it, grep it, back it up, feed it to another tool — without our permission, or even our existence.

Where it lives

The default location hugs your system's documents directory: ~/Documents/Previously (falling back to ~/Previously when there is no Documents folder). During setup you can move it, or point at an existing Previously repository — say, one you cloned back from GitHub — and the client will adopt it, history intact.

What's inside

Open the folder and you don't find a database dump. You find a tree that grows along time:

~/Documents/Previously/
├── episodic/
│   ├── slices/YYYY/MM/DD/HHMM/    # one folder per time slice
│   │   ├── timeline/core.md       # the verbatim conversation
│   │   ├── timeline/agent.md      # the agent's own cognition log
│   │   ├── timeline/appendix.md   # raw lines that didn't parse
│   │   └── previously.md          # the user card as of that moment
│   ├── timeline/index.json        # timeline index + monthly _index.json
│   ├── timeline.md
│   ├── strands.json
│   └── current-previously.md      # the living user card
├── evolution/
│   ├── direction.md
│   └── fitness.json
├── agent-playbooks/*.md
└── user/
    ├── config.json
    └── profile.md                 # name, timezone, how to address you

Each piece earns its place:

• timeline/core.md is the verbatim conversation. Turns are delimited as ## Turn N — ISO timestamp (role) — what you said is what it says, unedited.
• timeline/agent.md is the agent's own cognition log: extracted reasoning and tool calls. You see not only what it said, but what it "thought".
• timeline/appendix.md is the most honest file of the three: raw lines that drifted in format and failed to parse land here. No line is ever silently dropped.
• Slice frontmatter carries structured fields: slice_id, focus, summary, tags, status, start/end, open_loops, decisions, emotional_tone — plus a per-slice previously.md card snapshot.
• The index layer (strands.json, timeline/index.json and timeline.md, monthly _index.json) is a table of contents for humans and machines alike.
• The name and address_as in user/profile.md drive the title — Previously on <Your Name>.

Git is the ledger, not the lock

The folder is also an ordinary local git repository, maintained through isomorphic-git — pure JavaScript, so your machine doesn't need git installed.

But the division of labor matters: the filesystem is the source of truth; git is a best-effort ledger. A failed commit never blocks a write — memory hits disk first, the ledger catches up. The commit cadence mirrors the cloud exactly: one chat turn produces two commits (housekeeping + agent response), the scribe and ingest commit in batches, and previously stop sweeps up any uncommitted stragglers.

Want a backup? Push it to your own private GitHub repo. Runtime clutter — .workflow-data/, logs, scribe cursors — lives in ~/.previously, not in the repo, so the repository is safe to push as-is. A backup is something you push, not something we hold by default.

Related

• Time Slices — where every sentence in a single slice goes
• The Timeline — how slices weave into a browsable timeline
• Local First — why the memory sits on your hardware from day one