Saving data

novelibre saves the entire novel text as well as all metadata in a single text file with the file extension .novx. The text and spreadsheet documents created in the work process are considered temporary files, as their contents can be restored from the corresponding novx project file as long as it is kept up to date by timely reimport. So if a specific editing status is to be archived, this one project file is sufficient. However, there may also be additional files such as timelines or a project wiki.

Change notification

If you change the project during a novelibre session, the color of the footer bar changes to goldenrod to show that there are unsaved changes. This change notification is retained until you save the project or restore an earlier editing status.

Hint

For technical reasons, the change notification is retained even if you undo all changes. It therefore does not actually show a changed editing status, but that changes were made since last save.

To discard all changes since the last save, you can restore the last saved status via the Reload menu command.

Backup files

novelibre is designed to secure its data as well as possible. The current files are neither overwritten nor completely deleted, but backup copies with the extension .bak are created. In this way, the penultimate editing status is still available and can even be restored via the Restore backup menu command.

Hint

novelibre creates such bak backup copies not only for novx files, but also for the temporary text and spreadsheet documents and for files that are e.g. synchronized via plugins, such as timelines.

Optionally, you can also make novelibre create a copy of the project file in a custom backup directory each time it is saved. You should not work in this backup directory, which is why the backup copies are given a file name suffix that you must remove manually when restoring.

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Remarks on the file format

novx files are text files that are human-readable and can in principle be displayed and edited with any text editor. The text and data are structured using XML tags making the file understandable for computers.

The definition of the novx XML format can be found here:

https://peter88213.github.io/novxlib-docs/

The information is intended for computer experts who are interested in using the various standard techniques for reading and processing XML files. As a novelist and regular user, you don’t have to worry about any of this. However, you can relax in the knowledge that there are no secrets about the storage of your work results.

Anyway, there is one aspect for you to consider, namely the file version. It can happen that novelibre is extended by features that make it necessary to extend the novx file format as well. This is then noted in the changelog. In such cases, the version number of the novx file format is incremented. This version number is stored in the novx file and is checked by novelibre each time a project is opened. If novelibre encounters a file version that was created with a newer program version, this means that this project could contain information that the currently running program does not know and that could therefore be lost when it is saved again. For this reason, novelibre will not open such a file and will display a corresponding error message in the status bar.

Important

To avoid such problems, simply make sure that, if you are working on several computers, you have the same program version of novelibre installed everywhere. Preferably the latest release.