Keeping Your Work Safe

TheBrain gives you several safety nets. These topics cover undoing changes, forgetting thoughts instead of deleting them, the history of changes to thoughts and brains, earlier versions of notes, backing up and exporting a brain, and what happens after a crash or an interrupted sync.

• Undo and Redo — Undo and redo edits you make to a brain — creating and forgetting thoughts, links, moves, notes, and more — from the Edit menu, with Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z (⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z on Mac), or the Undo and Redo toolbar buttons on the desktop app and phones; the history survives syncs, and TheBrain asks first before undoing over a change that arrived from elsewhere.
• Forgetting and Deleting Thoughts — Forgetting a thought hides it without losing it; deleting removes it permanently and at once, with no confirmation prompt. Remember brings a forgotten thought back.
• Thought History — View a record of the changes to a thought, or to the whole brain — who changed what, and when. It's a read-only log.
• Note Versions — Browse a note's earlier versions read-only — who edited each and when, with its changes marked — and copy text from them back into the note.
• Backup to Brain Archive — Save a brain to a compressed .brz archive — a complete, portable backup — and restore it later, including where the file is saved and what to do when a restore is refused.
• Exporting Brains — Export a brain to a brain archive, Markdown files, JSON, a text outline, or a folder tree — optionally just the selection.
• Working Offline and Sync Recovery — Keep working offline and sync later; if a sync is interrupted, resume it; when the same things were changed in two places, TheBrain merges them for you — a note edited in both places takes both sets of changes, marking any clash with a pair of Conflict callouts, and a losing file is kept as a "[Conflict]" copy — so nothing is lost.
• Crash Recovery — When TheBrain has crashed or been forced to quit, the installed app reopens where you were the next time it starts, without asking — the brain tabs you had open (desktop) or your last view (mobile); the Improper Shutdown Detected prompt appears only after TheBrain has failed right after starting several times in a row.
• Note Recovery Files — On mobile, if recovered note files exist after a note could not be saved, you can send them to TheBrain support (or share them) or clear them from the Support group of the settings menu.