Conversation history that stays on your device

What a saved thread contains

A thread is more than a transcript. Reopening one restores the state you left, not just the words.

• A stable ID and a generated title, derived from your first message or attachment name and shortened to roughly 52 characters.
• Creation and last-updated timestamps.
• Every user and assistant message.
• Attached image data and locally extracted document contents and metadata, so a saved thread does not depend on the original file still existing.
• Selected-folder state and the source provenance behind folder-assisted responses.
• The provider profile name and model recorded against each assistant response.
• Pinned state, the context-compaction summary and boundary, your unsent draft, and the scroll position you left at.
• Its Takeaways, each tied to the message it quotes, and any notes you added to them.
• The copy of any Active Note you sent with a message, exactly as it was sent, and the system prompt the conversation uses.

Finding a conversation again

History opens in a flyout on Ctrl+H while the window is compact, and stays open in a sidebar once the window is wide. Both are the same list, built around the assumption that you will want something back weeks later.

Full-text search

across both titles and message content, so you can find a thread by something said in the middle of it.

Grouping

into Pinned, Today, Yesterday, Previous 7 days and Older.

Pin

the threads you return to. Pinned threads are exempt from automatic retention pruning.

Rename

when the generated title is not what the conversation turned out to be about.

Delete

with confirmation.

Open and continue

exactly where you were, scroll position and draft included.

The wide layout

Draft text is saved automatically after a short debounce, so a half-written question survives a retracted drawer, a switch to another thread, or a restart.

Switching threads or starting a new conversation also avoids throwing away an unsent message. A text-only draft in a saved thread stays with that thread; anything a draft cannot hold, such as attached images or documents or a message in a conversation that has not started yet, comes with you instead. Regenerate, Retry and Edit & resend send their own request without replacing what is already waiting in the composer.

Search finds a thread. When a conclusion or next step inside it is worth keeping visible without searching through the full thread, save it as a Takeaway: it stays on a card beside the conversation, quoting the message it came from, and All conversations searches the Takeaways of every thread at once.

Local history is not the same as model context

Your saved conversation and the context sent with the next request are different things.

When a thread outgrows the budget, SideNote Pro keeps at least the eight most recent messages intact, asks your configured model to summarize the older ones, and carries that structured summary forward. Your original messages stay in local history untouched. So a model may not recall a detail from forty messages ago verbatim while your archive still has it word for word. See managing conversations.

Retention, protection and deletion

History can be turned off

entirely in Settings, History.

Retention

deletes inactive threads after a number of days you set. A value of 0 keeps history indefinitely. Pinned threads are never pruned.

Optional encryption

applies Windows DPAPI to the conversation archive, binding it to your current Windows account. It protects the file at rest on this machine; it is not a portable password-based format.

Delete all history

permanently removes the archive.

Takeaways and their notes are part of the conversation for all of this. Deleting a thread, a retention period and delete-all remove them with it, and encryption covers them. Turning history off keeps the ones already saved and stops new ones until it is back on. Active Notes are not conversation history: none of this deletes them, while history protection encrypts them too.

Storage uses temporary-file replacement to reduce the chance of a partial write, recovers a complete temporary file after an interrupted replacement, and serialises mutations so two operations cannot corrupt the archive between them.

Settings › History

Getting conversations out

Any thread can be exported to a Markdown file from its menu in the history list, in the flyout or the sidebar. Document attachments are listed by name rather than having their extracted bodies dumped into the file.

Export all conversations…, under Settings › History, saves every saved conversation to one JSON file: messages, Takeaways and their notes, images, the text of attached documents, and notes sent with a message. It is an export only; SideNote Pro has no import for it. The file is plain text, not protected even when history protection is on, so save it somewhere private. It does not include your Active Notes library, settings, API keys or folder indexes.

For a single assistant response formatted for reading or sharing on paper, use PDF export instead. The two are deliberately different: Markdown exports the whole conversation as text, PDF exports one response as a document.

No cloud, and no sync

There is no SideNote Pro server holding a copy of your threads, no account to sign in to, and no synchronisation between devices. Your history exists on the machine that created it.

That is the tradeoff of a local-first archive, and it cuts both ways: nobody else can read it, and it will not follow you to another PC. Back up %LOCALAPPDATA%\SideNote Pro\ if the archive matters to you, keeping in mind that a DPAPI-protected archive is bound to the Windows account that created it. Export settings… under Settings › General moves your setup to another PC, but not your conversations or API keys.