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Data & file locations
Where Bedrova keeps models, galleries, search indexes, perception artifacts, logs, and secrets — and how external drives work.
Everything Bedrova creates lives on your Mac, under your control. This page covers what’s stored where, what to back up, and how external drives behave.
What’s stored where
| What | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Models (weights) | The model directory (Settings → General) | The largest data; can live on an external drive. |
| Image gallery | The image output directory (Settings → Image Generation) | Generated images plus reproducibility metadata. |
| Vector/search store | App data or configured index directory | Embeddings, visual document indexes, image/audio indexes, and rerank metadata for document chat. |
| Perception artifacts | Media/artifact directory | Masks, depth maps, OCR text, boxes, and pose exports created by Vision & perception. |
| Chat transcripts | App data | Retention is configurable (Settings → Chat). |
| Logs & diagnostics | App data | Used to build a diagnostics bundle. |
| Secrets (HF token, access keys) | macOS Keychain | Never written to plain settings or exports. |
Model weights are never committed anywhere or uploaded — they only move when you download or copy them.
External drives
Models can live on an external drive — useful when weights run to tens or hundreds of GB. Point the model directory at the drive in Settings → General. Bedrova:
- Uses security-scoped bookmarks, so access survives restarts without re-granting.
- Detects disconnects and offers to repair paths when the drive returns.
- Loads from the drive at its throughput — a slow drive shows up as longer load times, not as generation slowdown once the model is resident.
See Troubleshooting → external drive if a path breaks.
Retention
You control how long chat transcripts, parsed documents, search indexes, and perception artifacts are kept (Settings → Chat and Settings → Privacy/Storage). Deleting a document or media index removes its vectors/artifact links; deleting a model removes its weights from disk.
What to back up
- Models — only if re-downloading would be slow; they’re reproducible from Hugging Face.
- Tuned profiles — export a model’s portable sidecar to keep your tuning.
- Settings — export from any settings section (secrets are stripped).
- Image gallery and transcripts — if you want to keep generated work and history.
See also
- Privacy & security — the local-first stance.
- Network calls — confirming nothing here is uploaded.
- Diagnostics & support bundles — what leaves only when you choose.