Privacy and data (where files live)

Everything Perchnote stores lives under your own user folder, and secrets go to the macOS Keychain, never into the database.

Perchnote is local-first. Your meetings stay on your Mac.

Everything lives under your app data folder:

~/Library/Application Support/com.perchnote.app/

Inside it:

Path	What it holds
`perchnote.db`	The main database: meetings, transcripts, notes, tasks, folders, calendar events, and settings
`recordings/`	Your audio, one WAV file per meeting
`recordings/orphaned/`	Recordings not linked to a meeting (kept, never auto-deleted)
`models/`	Downloaded Whisper and voice models
`backups/`	Automatic daily database backups

Secrets are not stored in that folder or in the database. API keys, OAuth tokens, and your Slack webhook URL live in the macOS Keychain, which is OS-encrypted. The Keychain service is com.perchnote.app.

What stays local. Recording, transcription, diarization, and semantic recall all run on your Mac. The audio and transcripts never leave unless you act.

What can leave, and only when you choose. Perchnote only talks to services you connect yourself:

Anthropic. If you pick the Anthropic provider, the relevant transcript text is sent to Anthropic's API to generate notes or answer Ask AI.
Slack. If you share to Slack, the summary goes to your channel through the incoming webhook you configured.
Google. If you connect Google Calendar, Perchnote reads your events over OAuth.
Microsoft. If you connect Microsoft Outlook, Perchnote reads your events through Microsoft Graph over OAuth.
Hugging Face. Whisper model downloads, when you pick one in Settings, are fetched from Hugging Face.

Ollama and Apple Intelligence keep everything on-device.

At-rest security. The database itself is plain SQLite, so turn on FileVault (the macOS full-disk encryption) for at-rest protection. Secrets in the Keychain are protected regardless.

About You profile. When AI is enabled, every call carries a small "About You" blurb that adds personal context to summaries and Ask AI answers. With Anthropic configured, Perchnote refreshes the blurb weekly from a local aggregate of your own notes, and the refreshed text is what travels in the next call. Editing the field yourself disables the auto-refresh until you clear the field again. The About You blurb is the only personal context that ever leaves the machine alongside the transcript text itself.

Markdown mirror. Optionally have Perchnote mirror your notes to ~/Documents/Perchnote as plain markdown files. You pick the layout (flat, by month, or by folder), and the mirror follows your edits, renames, and deletes so the vault stays in sync. Each file's frontmatter carries your tags, a perchnote:// deep link back to the meeting in the app, and the recording's local path, which keeps it friendly for Obsidian Dataview.

Backups. Perchnote writes a daily backup automatically into the backups/ folder under the app data dir. You can also export one yourself from Settings, then Data. Backups are checksummed .perchnote archives, and the restore path is verified, not a generic file dump: importing a .perchnote archive checks the checksum and the schema match before unpacking, so a corrupted or mismatched archive fails loudly instead of half-restoring your data.

Data controls (Settings, then Data): export a full backup archive, verify a backup, set retention so recordings auto-delete after a number of days, and mirror tasks out to tools like Things, OmniFocus, or Slack.