"Your Data Map: Where Every Byte Lives"

This is a map of your data. Not a philosophy. Not a privacy policy. The actual file paths, what is in each one, and what reads and writes it. If you are evaluating owntime and data location is the thing that decides it, this is the post you can verify yourself.

#The timesheet

~/Documents/owntime/timesheet.db

This is the main file. SQLite. It holds your clients, projects, tasks, time entries, invoices, estimates, expenses, and settings. Everything except the receipt images lives here. The app reads and writes this file on every action. When you start the timer, this file changes. When you build an invoice, this file is the source.

You can open it in any SQLite browser. You do not need owntime to read it. If the app disappeared tomorrow, this file would still have your entire history in a format anyone can query.

#The receipts

~/Documents/owntime/receipts/

One folder. Each receipt is a file inside it, named with a timestamp and the original file name, sanitized for safety. When you photograph a receipt for a billable expense and attach it, the image is stored here, and the expense entry in the timesheet.db holds a reference to the file name.

The receipts live outside the database on purpose. Putting images inside a SQLite database works but makes the file large and slow. Keeping them as separate files means the database stays fast and the receipts stay easy to browse in Finder.

#The local backups

~/Documents/owntime/backups/

Automatic local backups of the timesheet database. About twenty of them, rolling, taken at most every six hours. When the app saves and the six-hour window has passed, it checkpoints the database, copies it to the backups folder with a timestamp, and prunes anything beyond the newest twenty.

These are yours to manage. You can delete them, copy them, open any of them in a SQLite browser to see your data as it was at that point in time. The app does not upload them anywhere.

#The sync folder

Wherever you point it.

In settings, you can designate a sync folder. When you do, every save copies the current timesheet.db to that folder as owntime.db. This is how you share the file between two machines: point both at the same Dropbox or iCloud Drive or Syncthing folder, and the file follows.

This is not magic sync. It is a file copy on every save. If two people write to the same file from two machines at the same time, you will get a conflict, and that is a limitation you should understand before you rely on it for multi-person work.

#The optional cloud mirror

Your bucket, your keys, your account.

Optionally, you can configure a Cloudflare R2 or AWS S3 bucket. When you do, and only when you do, every save spawns a background thread that uploads the current timesheet.db to your bucket, with credentials you provide, to an account you control. The app has no server of its own. The upload goes from your machine to your bucket.

If you do not configure a bucket, nothing is uploaded. There is no owntime cloud. The mirror is entirely optional and entirely yours.

#What is not there

There is no copy of your data on an owntime server, because there is no owntime server. There is no telemetry stream. There is no analytics account tied to your data. The five locations above are the complete map. If your data is not in one of those places, owntime does not have it.

#Why a map matters

A privacy policy tells you what the vendor promises

. A data map tells you what you can verify. I would rather give you the paths and let you check than give you a promise and ask you to trust it.

Open Finder. Navigate to ~/Documents/owntime/. You will see the database, the receipts folder, and the backups folder. That is your data. That is the whole map. Everything else is a copy you chose to make.

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