Saving Your Work

5 min readUpdated Aug 2026

Use Ctrl / ⌘ + S to send your work to the server right now instead of waiting for the next automatic save. Press it before you close a tab you care about. Kapy keeps your document in three places at once, and each has a different job: the tab you are working in, a copy in your browser's own storage, and the copy on the server.

Everything you own, listed. A document reaches this page on its own; you do not save it here.

Your work reaches the server on its own

You do not have to remember to save. While you edit, Kapy sends your changes to the server after five operations, or within about ten seconds of one, whichever comes first. It also refreshes the stored preview of the model as you go.

Ctrl / ⌘ + S, or the save button in the header, does the same write immediately instead of waiting for the next trigger. It is a flush, not the only route.

Read the indicator in the status bar to see where you stand:

The save indicator

It says	It means
Not saved yet	Nothing has been written for this document yet
Saving…	A write is in flight
Saved 5 minutes ago	How long since the last write of any kind landed: local copy or server, whichever came last
Save failed	A round trip did not complete. Try again, the document is intact

The local copy

While you work, Kapy writes the document to your browser's own storage about two seconds after you stop changing it, and flushes once more as the tab closes. Do not treat it as a save. It lives in that browser on that machine, and nobody else can see it, not even another tab of yours on another computer.

What it buys you is recovery. If you reload and the server's copy turns out to be older than the local one, because you closed the tab before saving, or the connection dropped, or the browser crashed, the editor hydrates from the local copy instead of silently opening the stale version. The last ten files you touched are kept this way.

Undo

Undo is transactional: one press takes back a whole operation, not a keystroke. Drawing a rectangle drops four lines, several points and a handful of constraints, and undo removes the rectangle, all of it, in one go, labelled with what it was.

It is also in-session. The stack lives in the tab, so reloading loses the history even though the document is exactly where you left it. Use undo for the last few minutes of work, not for archaeology.

Undo and redo

Keys	Action
Ctrl / ⌘ + Z	Undo
Ctrl / ⌘ + Shift + Z	Redo
Ctrl + Y	Redo, on Windows and Linux

Keeping older versions

Every save writes a checkpoint on the server, and some are promoted to hourly and daily snapshots in the background. In this release the editor gives you no way to browse them. The history is being kept for a version-history feature that is still being built.

Until it lands, two habits give you the same safety with what exists now:

Duplicate the file before a change you are unsure about. From the file manager, duplicate makes an independent copy in the same folder, a branch you can throw away.
Download a .kpy for anything you would be upset to lose. It is the whole parametric document in one file, and importing it back gives you the model with its feature tree intact, not a mesh. It is a paid-plan export.

The trash

Deleting a file from the file manager moves it to the trash rather than destroying it, and it stays there for 30 days. Restore puts it back where it came from, or somewhere sensible if that folder is gone. After the grace period it is deleted for good, so restore anything you still want inside those 30 days.