Snipbook

Documentation

Privacy

Your diaries and photos live only in your browser on your device — what that means in practice, and the few things that do use the network

There's no sign-up and no account. Snipbook doesn't know who you are, and it doesn't ask.

Where your diary actually lives

Every diary, every page, every photo you place — it's all stored in your own browser's storage, on the device you're using. When you create a page or drop in a photo, that data is written straight to your device; it isn't sent anywhere first. Nobody else — including the people who make Snipbook — can read what's on your pages. We simply don't have it.

This is also why the app works offline: your diary is already local, so there's nothing to fetch to open it. See Offline use for how that plays out day to day.

The flip side of local-only

Because your diary lives only on this device, it only exists on this device. Clear your browser's site data, uninstall the app, or lose the device, and the diary goes with it — there's no copy sitting on a server to restore from.

Two things help here. First, installing Snipbook as an app makes the browser far less likely to quietly evict its storage under disk pressure. Second, and more directly: you can export a diary as a .snipbook file — a single file containing every page, every element, and the full-resolution bytes of every photo and image you used, so it's a real standalone backup. You can save that file wherever you keep backups, and import it again later, on this device or another, to get the diary back. Right now this export/import is something you do yourself; it isn't automatic.

What does touch the network

Two parts of Snipbook talk to a server, and both are narrow:

  • The Store. Browsing the Store's collection of photos and stickers needs a connection, since the images live on a server and are fetched on demand. When you look at or pick up an item from the Store, the server sees which item was requested — that's the same as any normal image request on the web. Once you've pocketed a snippet, it's saved to your device and available offline from then on.
  • Anonymous usage data. Snipbook reports minimal usage data. This data never includes your diaries and any files uploaded from your device — they're only yours.

Nothing else leaves your device. If you never open the Store, Snipbook makes no requests for your diary content at all.

Cloud sync (coming soon)

Syncing diaries across your own devices isn't built yet — it's planned. When it ships, the intent is that your data is scrambled on your device, using a key only you hold, before anything is uploaded — a server would store only that scrambled data, never a readable copy, and only your own devices would be able to unlock it. Until then, a diary lives only on the device that made it, and moving it elsewhere means exporting and importing the file yourself, as described above.

See also