Where Your Data Lives
One file
Everything you enter — transactions, categories, accounts, statements, portfolio, credit cards, planned items, and the rules Aventurine has learned from you — lives in a single database file on your computer.
The file usually ends in .db. You choose where it goes.
Backing up your finances means copying that file. Moving to a new computer means copying that file. There is nothing else to gather.
Where it starts
On first launch, Aventurine creates finance.db in a folder belonging to the app inside your user profile. That works, but it is not somewhere you would think to back up.
Most people move to their own file early on: File → New Database, give it a name, choose a folder you actually use. From then on that is your database, and Aventurine remembers it between launches.
You can see which file is open at any time — its name is in the centre of the title bar.
What is not in the file
Your display preferences. Theme, density, zoom, currency symbol, number format, date format, week start, and the auto-lock settings are stored per computer, not in the database. Copy your file to another machine and your data comes with it; the appearance settings start at their defaults.
Two settings are in the database, because they affect data rather than appearance: Automatic Categorization on/off, and whether you dismissed the first-run setup.
Anything about you. No name, no email, no licence key, no identifier of any kind. There is no account to create.
What leaves your computer
Nothing.
Aventurine makes no network requests. It does not check for updates, report crashes, collect usage statistics, or look anything up online. Categorization, merchant recognition, forecasting, and every chart are computed on your machine from your own file.
The app does not ask for camera, microphone, location, or notification access, and refuses those requests if anything tries.
You can verify this by using the app with your network disconnected. It works exactly the same.
Encryption
A database can be encrypted with a password. Encryption is applied to the file itself: without the password the file is unreadable, including by anyone who copies it off your machine.
The password is never written to disk. Aventurine holds it in memory while the database is open and forgets it when the app closes or the database locks.
If you lose the password, the data is gone. There is no recovery, no reset, and no back door. This is what “encrypted” means. Keep the password wherever you keep your other important passwords.
Multiple databases
You can have as many as you like — household and business, or one per person — and switch between them with File → Open Database. Only one is open at a time.
Each is completely independent: separate transactions, separate categories, separate accounts, separate learned rules.
Files created alongside it
In the app’s own data folder there is a small pointer file that records which database was open last, so the right one opens next time. It contains a file path and whether that file is encrypted — no financial data and no password.
During an export, a partial file with a .part suffix appears next to your chosen destination and is renamed into place when the export finishes. An interrupted export leaves the .part file behind rather than a half-written file pretending to be complete; it is safe to delete.
Related: Backing Up Your Data · Databases and Passwords · Preferences