Keeping House
2 min read · 455 words
A Sovereign is easy to keep once you know where things go. The corpus folder is the centre of the house. Every book, conversation, event, co-created document, and system production lives there in a predictable shape. Learn the layout once, and you can find anything.
Where things live
The corpus root contains several top-level directories, each with its own lifecycle. The table below shows the main ones.
| Folder | What it holds | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|
| files/ | Imported books, articles, and Press editions | You |
| conversations/ | Rolling chat transcript corpora | You |
| calendar/ | Mirrored calendar events per provider | The sync job |
| cowork/ | Documents co-created by you and the companion | You |
| productions/ | Reports, translations, syntheses, and briefs | The system |
| evolve__*/ | Book-evolution atelier runs | You |
Each folder follows the same core convention: an index.mdx at the root, optional chapters/, optional assets/, and optional toc.json. This sameness is intentional. A book, a production, and a calendar mirror all speak the same folder language, so the Library can display them without special cases.
The files/ folder is where your personal library lives. The conversations/ folder holds chat transcripts. The calendar/ folder is machine-owned: the broker sync job rewrites it on every pass. The cowork/ folder is for things you and the companion make together. The productions/ folder is for things the system makes on your behalf.
Naming a folder
A book folder is named content-id_slug. The id is a UUID or a short generated identifier. The slug is a readable, URL-safe name. For example, this manual lives in c0ns111e-4d2f-4a8b-9c1e-000000000003_the-sovereign-users-manual. The id keeps the folder unique; the slug tells you what is inside.
Inside the folder, chapter files are named position-slug.mdx. The position keeps them in order, and the slug matches the entry in toc.json. The slug also becomes the anchor you see in the Folio reader. A clear slug makes deep linking easier.
Backups and exports
Because the substrate is plain files, backing up a Sovereign is mostly a matter of copying the corpus. You can use any backup tool you already trust: rsync, a NAS, a cloud sync folder, or a removable drive. The files are human-readable, so even without the Sovereign software they remain useful.
For a complete snapshot, use the distribution's export command. It produces an archive of the environment, the database, and the corpus. That archive restores on fresh hardware into the same system. The export is the escape hatch: if anything goes wrong, you can walk away with everything intact.
The index can always be rebuilt, so you do not need to back up the vector database as carefully as the files. Keep the substrate safe, and the rest follows. Regular backups of sovereign-corpus/ are enough for most people; run a full export before major changes or migrations.