How your work is kept safe

livesaver edits the files your music lives in. These are the rules it keeps, so that nothing is lost.

Before anything is written

• Nothing is written without your yes. On the command line every command only plans unless you pass --apply. In the app, every fix and every upgrade is reviewed first: what will change, and whether everything is ready.
• Never while Live runs. A set that is open in Live must not be rewritten under it. livesaver checks, and refuses.
• One run at a time. While one run writes, a second one is refused.
• Enough room. The copies have to fit on the disk your projects lie on.

When a set is written

• Only the bytes that must change do change. livesaver never reads a set into a model and writes it out again. It replaces the bytes of a reference, and everything else stays exactly as Live saved it.
• The result is checked before it replaces the set. It has to be well-formed, with as many references and devices as before, and every changed reference has to lead to its file.
• A backup beside every set. The set as it was goes to the project's Backup folder, named with date and time, as Live names its own backups.
• The original is kept as well, in livesaver's own folder. Live keeps only its newest backups; an undo works after Live has thinned them out.
• Written in one step. The new set is written beside the old one and then takes its place, so there is never a half-written set. Finder tags and comments stay.
• Dated as what it is. A set that was rewritten carries the date of the fix, as a set does that you save in Live. Its backup keeps the date the set had, and an undo gives the set that date back.
• A set that changed in the meantime is left alone. Between planning and writing, the set must still be the one that was planned for.

Afterwards

• Every step is in a journal, written before the step is taken. If a run is interrupted, the journal says how far it got, and an undo takes back what it did.
• Every run can be undone: see History and undo.
• Nothing is ever deleted. What an undo removes is moved to the Trash (on Windows: to a trash folder of livesaver's own).

Your data

• Nothing leaves your computer. livesaver has no account, no statistics, no network requests. The app asks nothing from any server but the livesaver on your own computer.
• Only its own page may ask. livesaver web listens on your computer only, and answers only the page it served itself: another site open in your browser can neither read nor change anything.

How this is tested

Against sets that Live itself saved, and read-only against a real library: 13,000 Live documents were read and written back without a change, byte for byte. See How it is tested.