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SUPPORTING KNOWLEDGE · 0014

What stays on your laptop

Berd is a local app, and most of what it holds never leaves your machine. But "local" is not "nothing leaves", and for a consultant carrying client material the useful question is: which things leave, to whom, and which things stay, where?

What the sources say leaves, and to whom:

  • Your prompts, attachments and context go to the AI provider you configured. Which vendor sees the material is decided when you choose a provider and model, per session.
  • Anything a connection or extension acts on goes to that service, under the grant you made. See Connections, extensions and who manages them.
  • A reply you approve through the Buzz Handoff skill goes to Buzz, under the identity configured in the agent's environment. Nothing else from a Berd conversation travels there.
  • Usage data goes to Block only if you turn it on. Telemetry is disabled by default in official distributions. If enabled, it sends a random installation identifier and predefined usage events, and excludes prompts, messages, files, source code, credentials, names, emails and IP addresses (though IP addresses are processed in transit). The in-app text says chat content is never sent, and Berd has no login, so there is nothing to tie data to. Forks may do otherwise.
  • Diagnostic logs go with a bug report only if you attach them. Attached logs are sanitised and exclude prompts, responses, tool payloads and session databases; omit the flag and nothing is attached.

Why it matters to you

The Buzz or Berd page draws the contrast: in Buzz whoever runs the relay can read everything, and the encryption and privacy facts behind that decide the hosting model. Berd removes the relay operator and replaces them with the provider, and whoever ends up holding the laptop.

That second party is the quiet one. All of this is on disk in plain form:

  • agents at ~/.agents/agents/, skills at ~/.agents/skills/, and project-local .agents/ folders;
  • Goose hints and memory under ~/.config/goose/, including any client fact saved there;
  • conversations, in the app's session store.

And here is the gap the Coach names rather than fills: no source says where the session store lives on disk, or whether it can be copied to another machine. The help skill mentions "session databases" only to say logs exclude them. Sessions can be exported one at a time from Session History and imported by running a copied command; nothing describes a whole-install backup or says whether Home layouts and settings move with you.

How to apply it

Decide the material first, then the tool. If a client would object to their material sitting on a personal laptop, it does not go into a Berd session, whatever the provider.

Know your provider agreement. The laptop is the boundary for storage; the provider for processing.

Back up ~/.agents and ~/.config/goose with your dotfiles, and export the sessions you may need to cite. Treat the rest of the session store as local until its location is verified.

Keep usage reporting a deliberate choice. The toggle is on the welcome screen and in the privacy area of Settings; in an official build it is off until you say otherwise.

Purge at the end of an engagement: memory entries about the client, project-local skills, connections into their systems. See How Berd remembers you.

If you ignore this

A laptop is lost with an unencrypted disk full of conversations nobody classified. A memory saved for one client surfaces in another's draft. Or you move to a new machine, copy ~/.agents, and find your conversations did not come with it.

Examples

A locked office instead of a shared one. Nobody walks in, but the papers on the desk are still papers, the courier (provider) still carries what you hand over, and nobody has told you which drawer the minutes are kept in.

A consultant uses Berd for first-pass reading of public sources, chooses a provider under an agreement the client has seen, and keeps the client's interview notes in Buzz on a relay the practice runs.

Telling a client "it's all local" as a complete answer. Prompts go to the provider, connected services see what the agent does, and the session store's location is not documented.

Do it: Know where your Berd lives, and back it up

Last checked: Berd v0.6.4, 2026-09-11.

Reference

Verified
Berd v0.6.4 · 2026-09-11
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Guide built with Berd, Claude and Codex · verified against Berd v0.6.4, 2026-09-11 · read from source, not yet tested in the app · Buzz Guide · About · not affiliated with Block