Nothing reaches your account until you save it

Converting a file used to put it in your account. Drop, look, close the tab — and it was there, along with everything else you had ever glanced at. Signing in was worse: whatever this browser had converted was uploaded in one go, so twenty-five things you had looked at became twenty-five documents you had never asked to keep.

Now a conversion stays in this browser, and Save puts it in the account. The history shows both and says which is which; sharing still needs a saved document, and says so rather than being mysteriously unavailable.

The connector and the API always worked this way — tp_convert_markdown saves nothing, tp_save_document saves — so this is the interface catching up with them.

The question behind this one is the one every online converter gets asked and most answer badly: does my file leave the machine. Here the answer is no unless you press Save, and it is worth saying exactly why that is possible.

Now a conversion stays in the browser that made it. Save is what puts it in the account, and nothing else does.

What that means in practice

  • Drop a file, read it, download the result, close the tab: nothing left our machine and nothing is on the account.
  • Signing in uploads nothing. The history shows what is local and what is saved, and says which is which.
  • Sharing needs a saved document, because a link has to point at something that exists — and it says so, instead of the Share button being mysteriously unavailable.
  • Deleting a saved document deletes it. The local copy is the browser's, and clearing site data removes it.

Why the conversion never needed a server

Every one of the ten conversions runs in JavaScript in your browser: Markdown, HTML, .docx, .csv, .xlsx, JSON, plain text, and the zip readers for a Notion, Confluence or Obsidian export. There was never a technical reason to send the file anywhere — the upload existed because the account existed, which is the wrong way round.

An account is for the documents you decide to keep, not a record of everything you looked at. If you never sign in, this site never receives a file at all.

Related: whether an online converter is safe, and sharing a document as a link.