Data locations
Where Kioku keeps your data on disk, per platform, and how that directory is laid out.
Base directory
Section titled “Base directory”Your Collections, media, backups and settings live under a single per-user app-data directory. The location depends on your operating system. A few smaller things live elsewhere; see Outside the base directory.
| Platform | Location |
|---|---|
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/Kioku/ |
| Windows | %APPDATA%\Kioku\ |
| Linux | ~/.config/Kioku/ |
On Windows, %APPDATA% resolves to C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming. On Linux, the base honors $XDG_CONFIG_HOME when set and falls back to ~/.config otherwise.
The rest of this page writes the base directory as <userData>. Substitute the value from the table above for your platform.
Layout
Section titled “Layout”Inside <userData>, the layout is:
| Path | What it holds |
|---|---|
collections.json |
The list of your Collections and which one is active. |
shortcuts.json |
Your keyboard shortcut overrides, shared by every Collection. |
collections/ |
One database file per Collection. |
collections/<Name>.db |
A single Collection’s database. The default Collection is collections/Default.db. |
collections/<Name>.media/ |
Media (images and audio) for that Collection, stored as a sibling folder next to its .db file. |
backups/ |
The backups root, a sibling of collections/. |
backups/<Name>/ |
Automatic backups for one Collection. |
Your Collections, media, and backups all live under this directory.
Collection databases
Section titled “Collection databases”Each Collection is one database file under collections/. The filename is derived from the Collection name (with unsupported characters removed), so a Collection named Work becomes collections/Work.db.
Kioku stores media per Collection, not in one shared folder. For a database at collections/<Name>.db, its images and audio live in the sibling folder collections/<Name>.media/. For the default Collection, that is collections/Default.media/.
Backups
Section titled “Backups”Kioku keeps automatic backups. They live under backups/ at the root of <userData> (a sibling of collections/, not inside it). Each Collection has its own subfolder, backups/<Name>/, which holds a database snapshot and a parallel media snapshot folder for each backup:
| Path | What it holds |
|---|---|
backups/<Name>/<Name>_<timestamp>.db |
A point-in-time copy of the Collection’s database. |
backups/<Name>/<Name>_<timestamp>.media/ |
The matching copy of that Collection’s media. |
The <timestamp> is derived from the backup time. Backups rotate automatically: Kioku keeps the most recent few per Collection and removes older ones.
To use the same Collections on more than one computer, see Use Kioku on more than one computer.
Outside the base directory
Section titled “Outside the base directory”These hold no Collection data, but they’re Kioku’s too:
| What | macOS | Windows | Linux |
|---|---|---|---|
| Logs | ~/Library/Logs/Kioku/ |
<userData>\logs\ |
<userData>/logs/ |
| Downloaded updates | ~/Library/Caches/kioku-updater/ |
%LOCALAPPDATA%\kioku-updater\ |
~/.cache/kioku-updater/ |
| Other caches | ~/Library/Caches/com.kioku.app/ and com.kioku.app.ShipIt/ |
— | — |
| System preferences | ~/Library/Preferences/com.kioku.app.plist |
— | — |
On Linux, the updates folder honors $XDG_CACHE_HOME when set. To remove all of these, see Reset or uninstall Kioku.