Where each workspace lives

There is no storage mode. Where work lives is a property of each workspace, not of the machine, and the tree in the menu bar shows it: the top level is the home - this Mac, or a box you can reach - and the workspaces that live there sit under it.

This Mac                      MAC
  Personal
  Home lab
studio.example                BOX
  Consulting
  Talks
Northwind team                BOX
  Northwind
  Design system

Position in the tree is the whole answer. A workspace under This Mac is markdown and JSON on your disk. A workspace under a box lives on that box's Postgres, and everything you do in it - notes, sessions, tasks, the PRD - goes there and nowhere else. No row needs a label saying where it is, because the level above it already said.

Two kinds of home

• A disk - ~/Recall/ on this Mac. Private, offline, nothing to run. There is at most one.
• A box - a rememd backend reached over HTTP with a credential. Your own, or somebody else's. There can be any number, and they are all the same kind: "my box" and "the team's box" differ only in who else holds grants on them.

Adding a box adds a sibling at the top of the tree. Nothing already on the machine moves, reflows or is relabelled.

Adding a home

Settings, under Storage, offers three rows:

• Add this Mac - a plain-files home on this disk, if there is not one already.
• Join an instance - redeem an invite somebody sent you. You get their box as a home, with the workspace they granted under it.
• Add an instance you run - point at your own box with its address and admin token. No invite: you stood the backend up, so you already hold REMEMD_ADMIN_TOKEN from its backend/.env. The box is checked before anything is written - a wrong port is reported as a wrong port, not as a bad token.

From a terminal the same two are rememd join <invite> and rememd add-instance --server <url>. The first-run wizard offers all three as well, so a fresh Mac with your own box behind it is not a dead end.

rememd instances lists every home, the credential each uses, and who you are on each.

Where a new workspace goes

Every workspace is placed once, when it is created, and never asked again. Create it from a home's row in the tree and it lives there. Create it from the New Workspace button at the bottom and, if the machine has more than one home, you are asked which.

You are a different person on each box

Each box has its own user row for you, its own admin flag, its own credential. The Settings row for a box says who you are there. Invites, the SHARED pill and "who else can see this" are all answered per box - the app never applies one box's answer to another's workspaces.

Being invited when you already keep work on your disk

Somebody invites you to one feature on their box. Your tree gains a second top-level node - their box - with just that workspace under it, beside This Mac with everything you already had. Their work stays theirs; yours stays yours; both are on screen at once. A voice walk over the connector reaches only the box it runs on, so what they shared with you is reachable in the app and from a terminal, not from their connector.

Local data is never deleted by a box

Joining or registering a box does not touch ~/Recall/. Removing a home from Settings forgets how to reach it and deletes the credential for it from this Mac; the data on the disk or the box stays exactly where it was. The confirmation says how many workspaces live there and that the credential goes with it.

The compatibility file

Older builds, and a process started by hand on a box, read a single credential from ~/.rememd/remote.json. It is written when it is empty, refreshed when it already names the box being added, and never repointed from one box to another - so a rememd older than this page keeps talking to the box it always did. rememd instances says which box it names. Nothing current reads it to decide where a workspace lives.