After a crash: your work and your data

If Lex Cloak closed unexpectedly, your work and your documents are safe, because in-progress work stays in a temporary folder on your own computer and nothing was uploaded. When you reopen the app, a dialog offers to Resume the work you were doing or Discard it, and Resume Most Recent picks the latest if there are several. A row may be disabled if it was saved by a different version.

Your work and your documents are safe

If Lex Cloak closed unexpectedly, take a breath. Your source documents are untouched, your in-progress work was on your own computer the whole time, and nothing was uploaded anywhere at any point. The recovery dialog is there to bring you back to where you were as cleanly as possible.

Two facts that bear repeating: Lex Cloak processes documents locally, so a crash is a local event with no external surface; and the saved redacted copies you produced earlier are on disk where you saved them, with the source PDFs they came from also unchanged.

Using the recovery dialog

When you reopen Lex Cloak after a crash, a dialog lists the in-progress sessions it found in the temporary folder. Each row shows the source document and when the session was last saved. Your options:

Resume on a row brings that session back. The matches, scope decisions, drawn regions, and rotations from where you left off are restored, and you continue the review.
Discard on a row removes that session from the temporary folder. Choose this when the session is from an experimental or abandoned pass you do not need.
Resume Most Recent picks the latest session if there are several. Useful when you want to get back into the work without thinking about which session is which.
Discard All clears every in-progress session. Use this only when you are certain none of them are work you want to keep.

A row may appear disabled, which means the session was saved by a different version of the app, usually after an upgrade. The metadata format changed and the saved state cannot be safely restored. Discard the disabled row and reopen the source PDF in the current version to redo that work.

What the temporary folder holds

The temporary folder holds your editing decisions for each document you were working on: which matches you toggled off, regions you drew, pages you removed, rotations you applied, and the per-document scope choices. It does not hold a copy of the document. The folder is managed by your operating system and is on your machine.

The committed working session file is the separate .lexcloak.json sidecar that you choose to save next to your PDF at Download. The temporary folder is the in-progress state that the recovery dialog reads from; the sidecar is the explicit save you keep afterward. See working sessions for the explicit-save model.