Built for the bad days

A novel is countless hours of work sitting in one file. Verkilo treats that file with the respect it deserves.

One file, like a document

Your whole project — every book, character, and note — lives in a single file on your computer. Treat it the way you treat a Word document: copy it, back it up, keep it where you can see it.

• One project file you can see, copy, and back up yourself
• Best kept on your computer’s own drive — the backups, not the project, are what belong in the cloud

Leave with everything, any time

A file format you can’t read without the app is a quiet kind of lock-in, however friendly the app. So Verkilo will hand you everything, whenever you ask.

Project → Export Data writes a full copy of all your project data at any time, in two forms:

• As Markdown — every scene’s full text, every character, location, and notebook entry as plain Markdown files, images included. Open the folder as an Obsidian vault and your links and tags just work — or point an AI assistant, a search tool, or version control at it.
• As a website — your whole project as a private site: open it in any browser, on any computer, no internet and no Verkilo required. Books read scene by scene; every character and place has its own page, down to who feels what about whom.

Export it once a month and put it with your backups, or never think about it until the day you want it. Either way, the door is never locked from our side.

The truth about cloud drives

Cloud drives are built for files you open, change, and close. A novel isn’t that — it’s a project that stays open all afternoon. Two things go wrong: the drive can upload a file in the middle of a save, and it can hand you a stale copy. Open your laptop before it has downloaded last night’s desktop session, and there are suddenly two versions of your book.

Verkilo assumes both will happen eventually:

• Every save is all-or-nothing — a complete copy of the project, swapped in whole, so a syncing drive never sees a half-saved file
• Before writing over the project, Verkilo checks whether anything else changed it. If something did, you get a plain choice — Overwrite, Save As, or Dismiss — before a single word is written
• If the project is already open on another computer, Verkilo tells you, instead of letting two machines fight over the file

Even so, we won’t promise a synced folder is safe. No writing app honestly can. Keep the project local, and let the cloud carry your backups.

What can follow you between computers

Your project file is one thing. The setup around it is another — interior templates you built, label groups and presets, keywords, the words you added to your dictionary, preferences like theme and editor width.

That part can travel. Point Settings at a folder your cloud storage already keeps in step — iCloud, Dropbox, whatever you use — and Verkilo keeps your library there too. Open the other computer and your templates are waiting.

• Templates, label groups, presets, keywords, your dictionary and your preferences travel
• Manuscripts don’t. Your books stay where you put them, and moving them is your call
• Items are kept separately, so two computers changing different things don’t tread on each other

Treat it as a convenience. If two machines change the same template while one is offline, the later change is the one that survives — and whatever your cloud storage does on a bad day, it does to templates as readily as anything else. Keep your backups running either way.

Snapshots, backups, and bad days

Revisions are supposed to be reversible. In Verkilo, they are.

• Take a snapshot of a section, a book, a character, or a location before a big rewrite — label it, and restore it exactly if the new direction doesn’t work out
• A dated backup of your project lands in your Documents folder every day you write. Point Dropbox — or any cloud drive — at that folder, and your book is safely off-site without ever syncing the live project
• If your computer crashes mid-session, Verkilo notices on restart and offers to pick up where you left off

And the bad day everyone actually fears — the laptop that won’t turn on, the coffee that wins? That’s what the synced backup folder is for. With your backups in Dropbox, the computer can die and the book doesn’t. Install Verkilo on the new machine, open the most recent backup, and keep writing. Your license covers all your personal computers, so the reinstall costs nothing.