buff docs › Your notes folder

buff has no database and no account. Your notes are ordinary markdown text files in a folder you can open yourself.

Where it is

  • iPhone and iPad: Files app → iCloud Drive → Buff notes.
  • Mac: Finder → iCloud Drive → Buff notes.
  • If iCloud Drive is off, notes are kept on the device instead (Files → On My iPhone / On My iPad), and buff shows a one-line warning when it opens.

What’s inside

File or folder What it is
logs/_original/2026-10-05.md Your notes for one day, exactly as you wrote them. These are the originals.
logs/2026-10-05.md A clean, tagged copy of the same day, built from the original.
todos.md All your todos in one list.
_index.md The people, projects and topics buff knows, their aliases, and a map of which days mention them.
inbox.md Notes from the share sheet or Shortcuts waiting to be filed.
sources/ Documents added with /ingest, converted to markdown; the original files are in sources/_originals/.
digest/ Saved reports, decisions, answers and briefs.
usage.md How often you’ve used each command.
README.md A short cheat sheet.

The originals are the source of truth

Everything except the originals (and your own edits to todos.md and _index.md) is rebuilt from them. That means:

  • To change a note by hand, edit it in logs/_original/. Edits to the clean copies in logs/ are overwritten.
  • /distill rebuilds today’s clean copy and the index. /distill all rebuilds everything from the originals. Run it if something looks out of date after editing files elsewhere.

Syncing between devices

buff uses iCloud Drive, so notes appear on your iPhone, iPad and Mac without any setup.

  • When a note arrives from another device, buff shows a line like ↻ 1 entry from iPhone.
  • Notes written on two devices while offline are merged, nothing lost. If the same note was changed in two places, both versions are kept, and /lint lists what was merged.
  • /sync shows the iCloud status: last refresh, files still waiting to upload or download, and any conflicts. Options → Vault shows the same.

Using your notes elsewhere

  • Open the folder in any markdown app: a text editor, Obsidian, iA Writer and so on.
  • You can add notes from a Mac by adding them to today’s file in logs/_original/; buff picks them up.
  • /export makes a zip of the whole folder and opens the share sheet, so you can AirDrop, email or save it.
  • /export md makes a single markdown file with all your notes in date order, easy to paste into another app or an AI chat.

Deleting everything

Delete the Buff notes folder in the Files app. Deleting the app does not delete your notes in iCloud Drive.