Saving, Autosave and Drafts

MDflow tries hard not to lose your writing. There are three layers to this: manual saving, autosave, and local drafts.

Manual saving

• Save button, or Cmd+S (macOS) / Ctrl+S (Windows, Linux).
• An unsaved-changes indicator appears whenever your text differs from the server copy.
• Your browser warns you before leaving a page with unsaved changes.
• Discard throws away your local edits and restores the last saved server version.

Autosave (Pro)

Turn autosave on per document from a toggle in the editor. When enabled, MDflow saves a few seconds after you stop typing — no manual save needed.

• The preference is remembered per document, in that browser. Turning it on for one document does not turn it on everywhere, and the setting does not follow you to another machine.
• The Save button and the keyboard shortcut keep working alongside autosave. Autosave adds a behaviour; it does not take one away.

Autosave is a Pro feature. See 04 Free and Pro Plans.

Local drafts

While you work, MDflow keeps your unsaved edits in your browser's local storage.

• Drafts survive a page reload and navigation between documents.
• Documents with a recoverable draft are marked in the sidebar, so you can find unfinished work.
• Drafts are cleared when you sign out — anything saved is safe on the server, but unsaved text in that browser is discarded. See 03 Signing In and Your Account.

How MDflow avoids clobbering newer content

A local draft is only useful if it is still relevant. If the server copy of a document has changed since your draft was made — because you edited it on another machine, or an API call or AI agent updated it — then your stale draft is discarded rather than restored.

This is deliberate. Silently reapplying an old draft over newer content is a much worse failure than losing a few unsaved words. If you need the old text back and you are on Pro, version history has it. See 06 Version History.

Working offline

• An offline banner appears when your browser loses its connection.
• The editor keeps working. You can carry on writing.
• Unsaved changes retry automatically when connectivity returns.

This makes the editor usable on a train or a bad conference wifi. It is not, however, a full offline mode: you need a connection to open a document you have not already loaded.

Which layer catches what

Situation	What protects you
You close the tab by accident	Local draft
You reload the page	Local draft
Your wifi drops mid-sentence	Offline editing + automatic retry
You forget to press Save	Autosave (Pro)
You want text you deleted last week	Version history (Pro)
You sign out with unsaved text	Nothing — drafts are cleared