Where is my text stored? Can you read it?

How the autosave actually works

What the editor saves, and when

localStorage is a small key-value store that browsers give each website. It sits on your own disk, and only pages from the same site can read it. As you type in the editor, a short timer restarts on every keystroke. About four tenths of a second after you pause, the current text is written under the key mdeditor.tw:doc. A brief "saved locally" note appears in the status bar. Reopen the page later and the draft is read straight back out.

Two limits worth knowing

• Only the latest state is kept. This is autosave, not version history. Each save overwrites the one before it.
• Storage is capped at a few megabytes per site. That is a huge amount of prose, but it is not a place to park base64 images.

How to verify it in a minute

You do not have to take our word for any of this. Open your browser's developer tools while you use the editor. The Network tab shows no request carrying your text. Under Application, or Storage, you can watch the draft sitting in localStorage for mdeditor.tw and updating as you type. Privacy built into the architecture is checkable. Privacy promised in a policy is not.

What a draft survives, and what deletes it

Every case, in one table

The draft lives in browser storage rather than on a server, so its lifetime follows your browser's rules, not ours. These are the situations people actually run into:

The rule behind the table

One sentence covers all nine rows. Anything that merely ends a session is safe, and anything that erases site data is not. Read it once and you will not need the table again.

The two habits that actually lose work

Private windows feel safer, and are not

Beyond a deliberate wipe, two everyday habits account for most lost drafts. The first is writing in a private window because sensitive text "feels safer" there. It is not safer here, only more fragile. The tab was already local-only, and incognito throws its storage away the moment you close the window.

Two tabs, one storage key

The second habit is subtler. Every tab on this site shares one storage key, so two editor tabs are two writers pointing at one file. The last save wins:

Tab A   Draft of the launch email, 900 words
Tab B   Opened later "just to test a table"
Tab B   Types one character - Autosave overwrites the key
Tab A   Closed. The 900 words are no longer stored

The fix is a habit, not a setting

Work in one editor tab at a time, and download a .md file before you open a second one:

Tab A   Ctrl+S saves launch-email.md to disk
Tab A   Now safe to close, reopen or overwrite
Tab B   Free to experiment with anything

Watch out: Text still visible in an open tab is safe, whatever storage says. If you spot the clash while the good draft is on screen, select all, copy, and paste it somewhere permanent before you touch anything else.

A backup habit that never fails

Export when it would hurt to lose it

Treat localStorage as a scratchpad, not an archive. The habit that works is small. Export a .md file whenever a session produced something you would mind losing, then save it where your real files live. Naming the download as you save it is what makes the folder usable a year later:

~/Documents/writing/
  2026-07-24-product-update.md
  2026-07-19-team-offsite-notes.md
  2026-07-11-conference-talk.md

Why plain text ages so well

Markdown files are about as future-proof as a document gets. No lock-in, readable on anything, and diffable in version control. Put that folder inside a git repository and you have the revision history the editor deliberately does not keep. Getting back in is just as easy: open the file in any text editor, copy it, paste it into the editor and carry on writing.

If you are still weighing up whether a free, local-only tool fits your work, is MD Editor free lists the trade-offs without softening them.

Shared, borrowed and locked-down computers

Library, hotel and borrowed machines

Local storage is private from us. It is not private from the next person at that keyboard. On a library terminal or a colleague's laptop, your draft stays in that browser until something clears it. Before you walk away, clear the editor. Or write in a private window on purpose, and accept that closing it discards everything.

Managed work laptops

Company machines add one more wrinkle. Two policies are common, and both are invisible until they bite:

• Logoff wipes. Site data is cleared every time you sign out of the machine.
• Nightly re-imaging. The browser profile is rebuilt overnight, and localStorage goes with it.

So a draft that survived yesterday may not survive tonight.

Tip: One rule covers every machine on this page. Download the .md file before you stand up, and the browser's storage stops mattering. That download contacts no server at all, which is also why it works on a guest network that blocks almost everything. Does the editor work offline explains that part.