Your writing is yours
Your novel is the most personal thing you'll put into any app. Here's exactly how Galley treats it, and all the ways it's built so you never lose your work or feel trapped. No hand-waving, including about the parts that are a promise rather than a guarantee. The short version lives on hard to lose, easy to leave; this page is the long one.
No AI touches your words
This matters enough to be blunt about: nothing in Galley writes, rewrites, or "improves" your prose. Its tools count and check and lay out the page, but not one of them puts words on it. Your manuscript is never used to train any AI, never handed to anyone, and no algorithm ever whispers a sentence into your book. The voice on the page is yours alone, which is the entire point of the thing.
It's hard to lose work here
Several safety nets sit under your writing, so a bad day can't cost you a chapter:
- Constant saving
- Saves as you type, again when you leave a chapter, and whenever you press ⌘S. No save button to forget. If a save ever fails, Galley tells you rather than pretending it worked.
- Version history
- Each chapter keeps snapshots (one a day, plus one whenever you snapshot by hand, change its stage, or make a big change). Compare any of them against your current text, then restore. Milestones are kept for good; a chapter keeps up to fifty snapshots, and only routine daily ones are thinned past that. See The editor.
- The 30-day bin
- Deleted chapters, characters, places, research clippings and whole books wait thirty days before they're really gone, so an accidental delete is easy to undo.
- Clash protection
- If the same chapter is changed on two devices, Galley notices and pauses rather than letting one silently overwrite the other. When the cause was a device being offline, nothing pauses at all: your newest words win the page and the other version is kept in History, see Writing offline.
- Offline writing Beta
- Chapters also save to your own device every couple of seconds, so a dropped connection or a crashed tab costs a sentence at most. Everything syncs when you're back.
You can always leave, and take everything
From the Toolkit , Back up everything downloads your whole library, manuscripts and story bible, as a single zip of open, standard files. You can also export any book as a PDF, EPUB, or Word document any time. Nothing is trapped in a format only Galley can read. Being easy to leave is how a tool earns you staying.
Where it's kept, and who can see it
Your work lives in Galley's database, tied to your account. Every table is locked down at the database level so a request can only ever return your own rows. One writer can never see another's book, characters, or notes. The app itself is private too; search engines never index it. Images you upload, like covers and ornaments, are stored as files attached to your book.
It's encrypted in transit (the connection between you and Galley is always HTTPS) and encrypted at rest on the servers. To be straight about what that does and doesn't mean: it is not end-to-end encryption where nobody but you could ever read it. It can't be, because Galley has to read your text to build your PDF, lay out your EPUB, and run checks like name consistency, the same way Google Docs or Notion do. What protects your privacy is a promise, not a locked box no one could open: your manuscript is never used to train any AI, never sold, never handed to anyone, and you can export or delete all of it whenever you like.
Will you run out of room?
Almost certainly not. Writing is just text, and text is tiny. An entire ten-book career takes less space than one photo from your phone. The only real limit is on images, capped at 10 MB each, comfortably more than print quality needs.