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.

Finding a conversation again

The history flyout, on Ctrl+H, is 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.

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.

Local history is not the same as model context

This distinction confuses people constantly, and understanding it explains a lot of otherwise strange AI behaviour.

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 and context.
• 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.

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.

Getting conversations out

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

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.