Where your data lives

Your genealogy lives on your device, in your browser’s private storage. Linea Codex has no server to upload to and no account to sign in with: when you import a file or create a project, it’s written to local storage on the machine in front of you and stays there. This page explains exactly where that is, why it keeps your data private and offline, what clears it and what doesn’t, and how you take your data with you when you go.

It’s the practical side of the philosophy in Why a GEDCOM-centric tool serves you — the home you keep your genealogy in, not the cage it lives in.

Where your projects physically live

Linea Codex stores every project in the Origin Private File System (OPFS) — a private, on-device file area your browser gives to a single website (an origin). It is real local storage, sandboxed to this app:

On your device	Files are written to your local disk by the browser — not to any server.
Per-origin	Only Linea Codex, served from its own origin, can read this storage. Other sites can’t see it, and it can’t see theirs.
Private	OPFS is not the public file system. Nothing here is uploaded, synced, or shared unless you export and send it somewhere.
No account	There’s no login. Your data is tied to the browser profile on your device, nothing more.

Your start-page project list is simply a view of what’s in this storage: every project you’ve imported or created appears there, and Open, Rename, and Delete act directly on the on-device copy. The workspace status bar shows how much room your projects occupy, labelled Space (OPFS):.

One origin, one library

OPFS is scoped to the origin and the browser profile. Your projects are visible in the browser where you created them; a different browser, a different device, or a private/incognito window is a different origin-and-profile pair and starts empty. There is no built-in sync between them — the way to move a project elsewhere is to export it (below) and import it on the other side.

Offline-first

Because the data is local and the app caches itself on your device, Linea Codex keeps working with no internet connection. After your first visit nothing more needs to load from the network to open a project, edit it, validate it, or convert it — the work happens in your browser, on your files.

Installing the app (an optional step covered in Install & go offline) makes this explicit: you get a standalone window, and — importantly for the section below — your browser is prompted to persist your storage so your projects aren’t cleared automatically when the device runs low on space.

What clears your data — and what doesn’t

Local storage is durable, but it isn’t a backup. It helps to know precisely which actions touch your projects and which leave them alone:

Action	Your projects
Closing the tab, quitting the browser, restarting your device	Kept — OPFS persists across sessions.
Settings → Advanced → Reset app cache	Kept — this only clears the app’s own cache and reloads; “Your projects aren’t affected.”
Visiting …/?reset-sw to recover a misbehaving app	Kept — same cache-only reset, OPFS is untouched.
Deleting a project from the start page	Removed — that one project, on purpose.
Clearing the browser’s site data / cookies for this site	Removed — this wipes the origin’s storage, OPFS included.
Automatic browser cleanup when storage runs low (if not persisted)	At risk — best-effort storage can be evicted.

The first rows are worth dwelling on: “Reset app cache” is safe. It’s the recovery tool for when the app itself serves stale assets or won’t update — it unregisters the cached app shell and reloads a fresh copy from the network, but it never reads or writes your project storage. The same is true of the ?reset-sw escape hatch. (See Settings for the Advanced controls.)

The last two rows are the ones to guard against. Clearing the browser’s site data is a blunt instrument that removes everything for the origin — projects and all. And on storage that the browser hasn’t been asked to persist, the browser may evict it on its own when space is tight. Two habits keep you safe:

• Install the app, which prompts the browser to mark your storage as persistent.
• Export your projects regularly — the only true backup is a file you hold yourself.

Tip

The app surfaces this guidance where it matters: a storage indicator in the workspace warns when your storage is best-effort rather than persisted, advising you to install the app or export your projects to protect them.

Getting your data out — no lock-in

Nothing here is a one-way door. Your project is a GEDCOM file, and you can write it back out to a portable file whenever you like — to back it up, to move it to another device, or to use it in another program entirely. From Saving & exporting your project:

Export	What you get
.ged file	A standalone GEDCOM file in your project’s version and chosen encoding — the same open format you imported.
ZIP archive	The GEDCOM file bundled with all of its local media. Works with any GEDCOM version.
GEDZIP archive	The standard GEDCOM 7.0 archive (the file as UTF-8, plus its media) in one bundle.

An exported file is yours outright: it opens in countless other genealogy programs, viewers, and charting tools, and it carries your complete tree with it. That’s the heart of owning your data — you can always leave, and your work comes with you. The fuller argument is in Why a GEDCOM-centric tool serves you.

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Related: Install & go offline · The start page · Saving & exporting your project.