Aerenium keeps everything on your computer. Cloud keeps an encrypted copy of the parts you cannot rebuild — what it has learned about you, and how you set it up — so a dead drive or a new laptop is an inconvenience rather than a loss.
An entire novel is about half a megabyte. Not a scanned one, not an audiobook — the words themselves, every last one, in plain text. Pride and Prejudice runs to 122,189 words and takes 735 KB. There was a time when people carried whole libraries home on floppy disks while a single photograph would not fit on one.
Nothing about that has changed. Storage grew by a factor most of us cannot picture, and a sentence still weighs exactly what a sentence weighed. What got heavy was everything around it — the photos, the video, the app bundles, the caches. Text just stayed quietly small while the world filled up around it.
Which is the whole idea here. What Aerenium knows about you — every preference it learned, every note it kept, the shape of how you work — is words. Years of it would not fill a single album. So we are not selling you gigabytes you will never touch. We are asking five dollars a year to make sure the words outlive the hardware.
A backup is only useful if you can trust what is in it — and only cheap if it stays small. Cloud saves the things that took time to accumulate and cannot be recreated, and deliberately leaves out the bulk.
Bulk media is what makes cloud storage expensive. Leaving it out is why this is cheap.
Aerenium snapshots itself on your own machine throughout the day — that part is a working cache and never leaves. What reaches the cloud is deliberate, and there is far less of it than people expect.
At the end of each day one snapshot goes up and replaces yesterday's. There is only ever one of these, so it costs the same space forever — roughly half a megabyte, whether you have used Aerenium for a week or a decade.
It is always the current state. If the machine dies today, this is what you restore.
When a moment is worth keeping — before a big change, the end of a project — you pin it. Pinned snapshots are stored separately, never overwritten by the daily save, and kept until you remove them.
These are the only thing that accumulates, which makes your storage entirely your own decision.
| What it is | On disk | Stored |
|---|---|---|
| Memory, settings and saved records | 3.2 MB | 435 KB |
| The text alone, without records | 760 KB | 134 KB |
| Your daily save, ongoing | — | one copy, about half a megabyte |
Compressed with DEFLATE before encryption — about a sevenfold reduction on this kind of content. Sizes measured on a reference install in August 2026; your own workspace will differ depending on how much you have accumulated, so treat these as illustrative rather than a guarantee.
A backup has to belong to something. You choose which, and the choice is the same one you make for credits.
People are right to be sceptical of a company offering to hold their data. So we built this the only way that makes the question moot: we never hold anything we could read.
Two things live only on your computer. Take them with you and everything else is recoverable; leave them behind and some of it is not.
Uninstalling Aerenium does not cancel anything or delete your stored backup — your plan runs to the end of its term either way. What uninstalling can lose is the two items above, if you did not write them down first.
100 MB holds the daily save plus roughly 200 pinned snapshots — and it is included with Pro, Pro Max and Enterprise. A bigger size, monthly expansions, and every rule about lapsing and moving out live on one page, written plainly.
