Where your work actually lives

There is no account, so there is nothing here to know you by. There is no server, so there is nowhere for your tasks to be sent. What you write on the desk goes into localStorage, which is a small store the browser keeps for one origin on one machine. That is the whole of it.

This is worth being exact about, because privacy is a word every product uses and almost none of them mean the same thing by. Wikly does not mean that your writing is encrypted on the way to servers only we can read. It means there is no way. Your tasks never become a request. There is no endpoint that could accept one.

One thing does leave, and glossing over it would undo the point of saying any of this. The page loads a cookieless counter, and it reports three things: that a page was opened, that a task was written down, that a task was finished. Names of events, nothing more. What the task says is not part of that and could not be — the counter has no way into localStorage, and nothing in the app hands it anything. But it is a request to somebody else's host, so it gets named rather than rounded down to zero.

What that costs

The browser owns that storage, and the browser is allowed to let it go. Clear your site data and the desk goes with it, the same way your history goes. Open it in a different browser on the same machine and it is not there, because storage belongs to one browser at a time. Open it on a different computer and it is not there either. A private window forgets it when you close the window.

None of that is a defect waiting for a fix. It is the shape of the bargain. An app that can restore your desk for you is an app that kept a copy of your desk somewhere, and then the interesting question is who can read that copy and what happens the day the company is sold.

The file

So there is a backup, and it is one button. Every key the app has ever written is gathered into a single JSON document, named for the day it was made — wikly-2026-09-11.json — and handed to your downloads folder. Tasks and their notes, your name and face, the lamp colour, the station the radio was on, every day you have finished something. All of it, because all of it lives under one prefix and a backup is a plain copy of those keys rather than a schema somebody has to keep in step.

It is readable JSON on purpose. A backup you cannot open is a backup you are taking on faith, and this app is not in the business of asking for faith. The one part that will not read as words is a desk with encryption switched on: those tasks are sealed bytes in the file, the same sealed bytes that are on the disk, and only your password opens them.

Restoring reads a file back the other way. Everything under the app's own prefix is cleared first, so what you end up with is the file and not a quiet blend of the file and whatever was already here. Between the clearing and the last write there is a moment when the desk is neither, so what was there is held aside and put back if anything goes wrong — a file too big for the store leaves you exactly where you started.

What it is for

Two things, and they are not the same thing. The first is the obvious one: a copy, for the day the browser is cleared or the laptop is replaced. Keep it somewhere that is not the laptop.

The second is that it is the only way your desk moves. There is no sync. Carrying your work to another machine means saving the file on one and restoring it on the other, by hand, on purpose. That is a step, and this is the sentence where we admit it is a step rather than describing it as a feature.

Make one now, while there is almost nothing in it. What you are establishing is the habit, not the file.