Will I lose my writing in Folio? How saving, history, Trash and backups work

Last reviewed November 4, 2026

Folio saves your writing to your account less than a second after you stop typing, keeps earlier versions of every scene, holds anything you delete in Trash for 30 days, and lets you download a backup file of any project at any time. We don't read your writing, and it is never used to train AI.

Autosave

There is no save button. Folio saves a scene a moment after you stop typing. The indicator in the top bar tells you where things stand: all changes saved, saving…, offline — will retry, or couldn't save — retry. If it says it couldn't save, your text is still on your screen; check your connection and it will try again. If a message mentions changes that "need attention", see what Folio's messages mean.

Version history

Folio keeps earlier copies of each scene. While you write, it saves a restore point at most every 10 minutes. Every restore point is kept for 48 hours, and after that Folio keeps one per scene per day. Free accounts keep 14 days of history. Premium keeps all of it.

Restore an earlier version of a scene

1. Open the scene in Draft.
2. Open Version history for that scene.
3. Pick a version in the list to read it.
4. Choose to restore it. What was there before is saved into the history first, so you can undo the restore from the same list.

Trash

When you delete a project, chapter or scene, it goes to Trash and stays there for 30 days. Open Trash to restore an item, or to delete it forever. After 30 days it is removed for good. Restoring a project brings back what was deleted along with it.

Backups you can download

Every account, Free included, can save a backup file of a project and restore it later.

1. Open the project and choose Export.
2. Set the scope to Everything and the format to the backup file.
3. Keep the file somewhere safe.
4. To restore, choose Import a backup on your projects page and pick the file. It comes back as a project.

Premium adds automatic backup files saved to a folder on your own computer (in Chrome and Edge), or a one-click download of everything with reminders in other browsers.

What we do on our side

We back up Folio's database every day to encrypted storage. Daily copies are kept for 35 days and a monthly copy is kept for over a year, so we can recover from a serious problem on our end. These are for disaster recovery only.

Who can read your writing

We don't read your writing, except where needed to run or secure the service or where the law requires it. Nothing you write is used to train an AI model, and Folio has no AI features. Folio is not end-to-end encrypted: your writing is stored in a form our systems can read, because that is how the app shows it to you and syncs it between devices. The details are in the privacy policy.