Your data
This page explains how Galley handles your writing, how it keeps you from losing work, and how you can take everything with you. Some of it is a technical guarantee and some of it is a promise, and I've said which is which. There's a shorter version on Safe & Secure.
No AI touches your words
Nothing in Galley writes, rewrites or "improves" your prose. Its tools count, check and lay out the page, but none of them add words. Your manuscript is never used to train any AI and never shared with anyone, and nothing suggests sentences for your book.
It's hard to lose work here
Your writing is protected in several ways:
- Constant saving
- Galley saves as you type, when you leave a chapter, and when you press ⌘S, so you don't need to remember to save. If a save fails, Galley tells you.
- Version history
- Each chapter keeps snapshots: one a day, plus one whenever you take a snapshot yourself, change its stage, or make a big change. You can compare any of them with your current text and restore it. Milestones are kept forever. A chapter keeps up to fifty snapshots, and after that only the daily ones are thinned out. See go back to an earlier version.
- The 30-day bin
- Deleted chapters, characters, places and research clippings stay in the bin for thirty days before they're deleted, so you can undo an accidental delete. Deleted books stay in the bin on your dashboard until you restore them or delete them permanently.
- Clash protection
- If the same chapter is changed on two devices, Galley notices and pauses instead of letting one version overwrite the other. If it happened because one device was offline, it doesn't pause: your newest version is shown and the other one is saved in History. See Writing offline.
- Offline writing Beta
- Chapters are also saved to your device every couple of seconds, so if you lose your connection or your tab crashes, you'll lose a sentence at most. Everything syncs when you're back online.
You can always leave, and take everything
In the Toolkit , Back up everything downloads your whole library, including your manuscripts and story bible, as one zip of standard files. You can also export any book as a PDF, EPUB or Word document at any time. Nothing is saved in a format that only Galley can open.
Where it's kept, and who can see it
Your work is stored in Galley's database and linked to your account. The database only lets each account see its own data, so no other writer can see your book, characters or notes. The app isn't indexed by search engines. Images you upload, like covers and ornaments, are stored as files with your book.
Your data is encrypted in transit (Galley always uses HTTPS) and encrypted on the servers. It is not end-to-end encrypted, meaning it isn't set up so only you could ever read it. It can't be, because Galley needs to read your text to make your PDF and EPUB and to run checks like name consistency, the same as Google Docs or Notion. So your privacy relies on a promise: your manuscript is never used to train any AI, never sold, and never shared, and you can export or delete all of it whenever you like.
Will you run out of room?
Very unlikely. Text takes up very little space, so ten whole books use less space than one photo from your phone. The only limit is on images, which can be up to 10 MB each. That's more than enough for print quality.