Storage location

Trove writes everything to a single root folder on disk. By default that’s ~/Documents/trove/, but you can put it anywhere.

Why the root matters

Trove is local-first by design — there is no cloud. The Trove root is where your work lives. If you back up that folder, your work is backed up. If you sync it with iCloud Drive or Dropbox, your work syncs. If you point Trove at the same root on a new machine, the new machine sees the same Projects.

Choosing a root

You’re prompted to pick one on first launch (or you can change it later in Settings → Storage). Good candidates:

• ~/Documents/trove/ — the default. Inside Documents, which is usually backed up by Time Machine.
• Inside an iCloud Drive folder — for personal sync across your own Macs / iOS file browsing. iCloud handles conflicts reasonably for text files; it does sometimes lag with many small files.
• Inside a Dropbox / OneDrive folder — similar; works well, watch for sync lag on first push of a big Project.
• Inside a git repository — best version control. git add your Manuscripts and Worlds. Use .gitignore to skip .trash/ and large media if you want.

What you should not do

• Don’t put your Trove root inside another app’s working directory. Avoid putting it inside Scrivener libraries, Notion sync folders, Obsidian vaults — those tools may rewrite or lock files unpredictably.
• Don’t share a single Trove root over multi-user sync with concurrent writes from two machines. Trove is single-writer per file. If you open the same Project on two machines simultaneously and both edit the same Document, the last save wins.
• Don’t use a network-mounted folder with high latency (e.g. SMB over the open internet). Trove writes Markdown atomically but a lossy network mount can corrupt files.

Moving your root

To move everything to a new location:

1. Quit Trove.
2. Move the contents of your current Trove root to the new location (Finder, mv, whatever you prefer).
3. Launch Trove. It’ll notice the root is missing and prompt you to point at the new one.

Your license.toml lives in app data, separately — it stays put.

Backups

Whatever you use for the rest of your important files. Trove’s data is plain Markdown and TOML — every backup tool understands it.

A common minimum setup:

• Time Machine (or equivalent) for daily local backups.
• iCloud Drive / Dropbox / git for off-machine continuity.

Inside the Trove root you can safely back up everything. The .trash/ folder holds soft-deleted items you can restore from inside Trove; you can purge it from Settings → Storage if it gets large.