Your data

Everything PhoneDesk knows lives in one folder on your computer. There is no account and no cloud.

OS	Default folder
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/PhoneDesk
Windows	%AppData%\PhoneDesk

What	Where
Phones, credentials, templates and settings	inventory.json
Encryption key for the passwords	secret.key, readable only by your user
The last reading of every phone, so the app opens with data	snapshots/
Saved copies of each phone's settings	backups/<phone id>/
Firmware images	firmware/

Passwords in inventory.json are encrypted with AES-GCM using the key in secret.key. They're never shown in the app again after you enter them.

Choosing another folder

Settings → Data → Change… picks a different folder: another disk, a synced drive, a shared folder. You choose whether to move the current data there, copy it, or open data that's already in that folder. The key moves with the data, so the same folder works from any computer that can reach it. Use default goes back.

A small location.json in the default folder remembers the choice. If the chosen folder isn't available when PhoneDesk starts (an unplugged drive, say), it opens the default folder and tells you.

Moving to another computer

Settings → Data → Export… writes a single .pdbak file with everything, optionally including the saved copies and last readings. Passwords inside are re-encrypted with a passphrase you choose (Argon2id for the key, AES-GCM for the data), so the file is safe to carry around and opens on any computer with that passphrase.

On the other computer, Import… opens the file and either adds its phones and templates to what's already there (phones that already exist are skipped) or replaces everything with the file's contents.

What leaves your computer

• Requests to your phones' web interfaces.
• A request to api.github.com at start and every six hours, to see whether a newer PhoneDesk release is out.
• Downloads you start from the firmware library, from whatever link you pasted.

Nothing else.