Data locations

Where Kioku keeps your data on disk, per platform, and how that directory is laid out.

Base directory

All of Kioku’s persistent data lives under a single per-user app-data directory. The location depends on your operating system.

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, falling back to ~/.config.

Note

The per-platform base paths come from your operating system’s conventions, not from a path hard-coded in Kioku. Kioku appends the app name to that base. If you have relocated your OS-level application-data directory, the paths above shift accordingly.

The rest of this page writes the base directory as <userData>. Substitute the value from the table above for your platform.

Layout

Inside <userData>, the layout is:

Path	What it holds
collections/	One database file per Collection.
collections/<Name>.db	A single Collection’s database. The default Collection is collections/Default.db.
collections/<Name>.media/	Image media 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

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.

Media

Media is stored per Collection, not in one shared folder. For a database at collections/<Name>.db, its images live in the sibling folder collections/<Name>.media/. For the default Collection, that is collections/Default.media/.

Caution

Media files are not contained in the .db file itself. Exporting a Collection as a .db file does not include its media. To preserve images, use full backups instead of a database-only export. See Back up & export.

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>/, holding both a database snapshot and a parallel media snapshot folder per 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, keeping the most recent few per Collection and removing older ones.

Related

• Collections
• Back up & export
• Glossary: Collection