Your data

Where your research lives, and how to take it with you or remove it.

Everything you make in Wellspring is yours and stays on your device. This page shows exactly how to export it, move it, and delete it.

Where it is

Wellspring keeps your notes, highlights, bookmarks, reading history and positions, sermons, collections, claims, preferences and study-assistant settings in your browser’s local storage, on this device, for this browser. Another browser or another device has its own, separate copy — nothing is shared between them until accounts exist. A private or incognito window keeps nothing after it closes.

Export a backup

  1. Open Settings.
  2. Under Your research data, choose Export research backup.
  3. A file named wellspring-research-backup.json is saved by your browser. It is plain JSON you can open and read; it holds everything listed above except the study assistant’s endpoint key, which is never exported.

Export before clearing your browser, switching devices, or deleting your research, and export from time to time in any case.

Move it to another browser or device

  1. Export a backup as above.
  2. On the other device, open Settings and choose Import backup.
  3. Choose the file. Wellspring checks it before anything changes; a file it cannot read is refused with an explanation, and nothing is lost.

Delete it

In Settings, under Delete your research from this browser, choose Delete all my research and confirm. This removes everything Wellspring holds in this browser — research, preferences, assistant settings and key. It cannot be undone, and there is no copy anywhere else, so export first if you want one. The library is unaffected; Wellspring itself keeps working, as it would for a new visitor.

Clearing your browser’s site data for this site does the same thing.

What we hold about you on our side

Nothing. There are no accounts, so there is nothing for us to export or delete on your behalf. If you believe otherwise, write to privacy@wellspringstudy.org.

When accounts arrive

At public launch a free account will be required, and your research will live in it and follow you between devices. Before that ships, this page will describe: the import of the research already in your browser (shown first, backed up first, never attached to an account silently), export from the account, deletion of the account and everything in it, and what happens on a shared computer when you sign out. The design for this is public in the project’s documentation.