where your data lives

Every recording you make lives in one folder, called the vault. Not a database you need the app to open — a normal folder, with normal files, that you can browse in your file manager today and in twenty years.

Open Settings → your vault and click Reveal in file manager to look at yours.

the folder is the truth

yapyap treats the vault as the authority and its own database as a copy. That has consequences you can rely on:

• Drop audio in inbox/, and it becomes a recording. Any audio file you put in the vault's inbox/ folder is imported — moved out into a dated folder, then transcribed. A phone recording, an old interview, a folder of voice memos: drop them in there. Files anywhere else in the vault are left where they are.
• Files you add are kept as they are. An imported file is never transcoded or renamed away — the original stays, byte for byte.
• A missing file never deletes your data. If a file disappears — an unmounted drive, a sync conflict — yapyap waits. Deleting a recording is always an explicit act in the app, and even then the files move to a .trash folder inside the vault for 30 days first.
• The database can be rebuilt from the folder. Copy your vault to a new machine and click Rebuild library — everything comes back: recordings, transcripts, speakers, lenses, vocabulary. Two things do not travel in the folder, by design. Once a vault has been used by a licensed copy of yapyap, the titles, marks and speaker names in logs/ are locked to that license, so activate the same key on the new machine before rebuilding — the audio and the transcript files beside it are readable either way. And the new install is a new device as far as syncing goes: it has its own identity, so pair it again from a machine that is already in the fold rather than expecting the license key to hand it back.

what is in there

Recordings live in dated folders: the audio (FLAC, or an imported file byte-for-byte) with a transcript file beside it, in the format of your choice. Everything else — titles, marks, speakers, and the transcript's own history — lives in the vault's logs/ folder: an append-only record every machine that shares the vault can read and merge. The exact layout is in the file map.

The transcript files are the quiet feature: beside every recording sits a Markdown (or .txt, .vtt, .srt, .json, .csv) file that any editor can read. Your notes outlive the app.

put it somewhere that suits you

Because the vault is just a folder, it can live anywhere a folder can: an external drive, a NAS, a synced folder shared with a second machine. See move your vault.

what is not in the vault

Models, caches, the license, and the app database live in yapyap's own app-data folder. Nothing in there is precious: the vault plus a fresh install rebuilds it all.