Sync & backup

What follows your account to another Mac, what encrypted backup adds and how to switch it on, what stays on each Mac and where your data is kept.

These are two different things.

Sync carries your setup: personas, snippets, dictionary, hotkeys and preferences. It’s automatic, it’s on every plan and there’s nothing to switch on.

Encrypted backup is about your content: where encrypted backup is switched on for your account, an encrypted copy of your calls, dictation transcripts, notes and folders is kept on our servers. It’s optional, on every plan and starts switched off, in the Backup tab of Settings.

What follows your account

Dictation personas, including their apps and websites and which one is the default.
Snippets and Dictionary words, including the variations you added yourself.
Settings that describe how you work: your Transcribe and Calls hotkeys, dictation language, paste behaviour, sound choices, whether dictations are saved, your PDF download preferences and whether memory and your dictionary are switched on.
Your plan: the subscription and the free trial belong to the account, not the Mac. See Plans & trials.

Sync works offline first: changes are saved on your Mac, then synced in the background, with retries. There’s no sync button and no sync error to deal with; if the connection drops, the app catches up once you’re back online.

Note: These are stored with your account in a form we can read, so keep anything private out of a persona or a snippet.

Encrypted backup

An encrypted copy of your content on our servers, so it survives a lost Mac and appears on your other ones. It’s in Settings → Backup on every plan; during a free trial that tab isn’t there.

Settings → Backup, switched on: the status line, the backup check and the off switch

What it carries: saved calls with their transcripts, takeaways and chats; your dictation transcripts; your notes; folders and tags; and the text pulled out of files you attached.

What it never carries: audio. Dictation recordings and call audio are never backed up and never stored on Cluinn’s servers. Cluinn transcribes on your own Mac wherever it can: on a recent Apple silicon Mac with an active plan, your speech becomes text on the machine itself, with no external speech model and no audio uploaded. During a trial, or any time Cluinn can’t run the on-device model, the audio is sent to our servers to be turned into text and discarded straight after. The attached files themselves aren’t backed up either, only the text read from them.

The copy we keep is encrypted.

Turning it on

Enable backup turns it on in one click. There’s nothing to download and nothing to keep: signing in to your account is what brings the backup back.

Backup doesn’t run during a free trial. When your plan starts, the Backup tab appears and Cluinn asks you once whether to switch it on. Where encrypted backup is switched on for your account, everything from the trial is backed up too.

On another Mac

Sign in, and your calls, transcripts and notes are restored. You can quit part-way and the restore picks up where it left off. The audio doesn’t come back, because audio is never backed up.

Checking and turning off

Backup check: Check now compares what’s on this Mac with what’s in the backup and tells you if anything is missing. Cluinn also runs it automatically.
Turn off backup: “Stops backing up. Nothing on this device is deleted.” The copy on our servers is kept for a short while first, and the page shows the date it will be deleted. Turn backup back on before then and nothing is lost.

Tip: Because signing in is what opens your backup, it’s worth turning on two-factor sign-in; see Security.

A copy of your data

Separate from backup, and available whether or not it’s switched on for your account: the A copy of your data row in Settings → Content (“One file you keep yourself, with its own password.”). Export… writes that file; Import… brings one back, adding its items alongside what’s already on the Mac rather than replacing anything. Audio isn’t included. See Content.

What stays on this Mac

Dictation audio and call audio, always, on every account.
Your microphone and its level, chosen per Mac, because the hardware is.
Appearance: Theme (System, Light or Dark) and Recorder position are set on each Mac.
How this Mac behaves: Launch at login, Show in Dock, Show in Menu Bar and the two clean-up rules: Delete automatically (dictations) and Empty automatically (deleted calls).

Your transcripts, calls and notes are kept on this Mac. Where encrypted backup is switched on for your account, an encrypted copy is kept on our servers as well.

Note: AI requests pass through Cluinn’s servers, and none of their content is stored there. Where encrypted backup is switched on for your account, that backup is the only place your content is stored on our servers.

Where your data is kept

Everything on your Mac is in ~/Library/Application Support/Cluinn/Cluinn/users/<your-account-id>/. Each account signed in on the Mac gets its own separate folder, so two people sharing a Mac never see each other’s recordings or calls. Signing out leaves the data in place in your account’s folder: sign back in and it’s all still there.

Moving to a new Mac

Install Cluinn and sign in, and your personas, snippets, dictionary and synced settings are already there. macOS permissions are per Mac, so grant them again, and choose your microphone and theme once.

Where encrypted backup is switched on for your account, your calls and transcripts come with you: sign in and they’re restored. Otherwise they stay on the old Mac, and the audio stays there either way.

You can also see and end sessions on your other Macs in Settings → Security; see Security.