There are two ways to mean "local-first" in 2026, and they're not the same.

The first meaning is "we put a desktop app in front of a cloud-sync backend, but most of your data lives there". This is what most "local-first" tools actually are — useful, but the data isn't really yours. It lives on someone else's servers, syncs through someone else's pipeline, and vanishes the day that company runs out of money.

The second meaning is what Timex does. Your activity stays on the Mac it was recorded on. There's no server. There's no account system. There's no API endpoint to leak. The software is a binary. The data is a single file. That's the whole product.

This post is the full tour: where the data lives, how to back it up, how to verify the no-network claim yourself, and what it actually costs to skip the cloud.

Where it lives

Open Finder. Press ⇧⌘G. Paste:

~/Library/Application Support/io.muvon.timex/

That folder is everything Timex has ever written to your Mac. Every app you used, every window you opened, every browser tab you visited, every break you took, every lid-down session — all in one place.

That's it. There's no other state. No companion service running in the background. No ~/.config daemon. No keychain entry. No launchctl job that survives uninstall. Drag Timex.app to the Trash, run rm -rf on that folder, and there's literally nothing left.

# Wipe everything Timex ever wrote
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/io.muvon.timex

That's the entire uninstall. No vendor portal to log into and "request data deletion". No 30-day grace period. The bytes are gone the moment the disk write completes.

How to back it up

Pick whichever of these you already use:

Time Machine — included on every Mac. Just works. Restores everything when you migrate to a new machine.

iCloud Drive / Dropbox — copy the whole io.muvon.timex folder into your synced location. Symlink back into ~/Library/Application Support/. Now you've got an off-Mac copy. Note: don't run two Timex installations against the same synced file at the same time. The local file is owned by one Mac at a time.

rsync to a NAS — for the script-savvy. Schedule a nightly rsync to a Synology, an external drive, or a server you trust. The file is small enough that even daily snapshots are cheap.

A USB stick — copy when you want a snapshot you control. Old-fashioned. Works.

You don't need a Timex account to do any of this, because there isn't one. Whatever backup story you already trust for the rest of your Mac is the backup story for your Timex data.

Exporting

Timex ships with one-click export inside the app — Settings → Export → CSV. You get a clean spreadsheet of every recorded session, ready for whatever pivot table or invoicing tool you live in. The export isn't a "preview tier with cloud watermarks" — it's the whole dataset, every time, no upgrade required.

If the in-app CSV doesn't get you exactly what you need, the local file is in a format that's been stable for 25 years and is readable by every database client and every analytics tool ever shipped (DuckDB, pandas, Polars, Excel via ODBC, you name it). Open it directly. Build whatever dashboard you want. We're not gatekeeping it.

Verifying the no-network claim

You don't have to take our word for it. Three tests, roughly increasing in commitment:

1. The "little fence" test. Install Little Snitch (or LuLu, or Hands Off, or your firewall of choice). Block all outgoing traffic for Timex.app. Use it for a week. Notice: nothing breaks. Tracking still works. Breaks still fire. Lid-down still works. There's no cloud retry queue silently building up — there's no cloud connection at all.

2. The "airplane mode" test. Disconnect from wifi entirely. Turn off Bluetooth. Use Timex for a day. Same result. Identical to a connected day.

3. The "tcpdump" test. For the truly suspicious. Run a packet capture filtered by Timex's process. You'll see exactly zero packets leave on its account.

This isn't a privacy policy. It's architecture. Privacy policies are promises the vendor decides to keep. Architecture is what's actually possible.

The cost of going local-first

Honest accounting of what you give up by skipping the cloud:

No cross-device sync. If you use a desktop and a laptop, each has its own file. The iCloud-folder workaround above is BYO and not officially supported. Proper opt-in sync may show up later. It won't be a default.

No "manager dashboard". If you bill clients and your boss wants a shared view, this isn't the right tool. Toggl, Harvest, and Timing's team plans exist for that.

No "weekly insights" email. Some people genuinely like getting a Sunday-morning recap of last week. The way that gets built without a server is: Timex generates the recap locally and shows it to you in the app. That's on the roadmap. The version where it gets emailed by some SMTP server we own is not.

No mobile companion. Your activity lives on a Mac. You read it on a Mac. There's no iPhone app because there's no cloud to feed it.

What you get in return is a tool that survives the company you bought it from getting acquired, the cloud provider raising prices, the next data breach making the news, and the wifi being down on a flight. The file stays put. So does its content.

On longevity

The format Timex writes to is older than half the engineers reading this post. It's deployed in a few billion phones, every browser, every car, every aircraft, every router. It has a zero-defect, twenty-year backward-compatibility guarantee from its maintainers. There's no realistic future in which "I bought Timex in 2026" turns into "I can't read my Timex data in 2046".

You'll find that comforting or you won't. If you're the kind of person who's switched five photo apps because each one held your library hostage — you'll find it comforting.

Try it

Install Timex free for 100 hours of tracking. The break timer and lid-down mode stay free forever. Buy when you're sure. The data stays on your Mac either way.