private/ is not.
The folder is yours
Your markdown folder is the source of truth. The hosted copy, when you use one, is a replica. Cancel cloud and the folder on disk still works. We do not train models on your notes. Logs never contain note text.private/
Notes underprivate/ are locked with your passphrase. If you lose it, those notes are unrecoverable — there is no reset, and we do not hold a copy of the key.
On a vault with private notes enabled, use the same passphrase on each device via ELANOTES_E2EE_PASSPHRASE. There is no reset.
Cloud never sees private/. Sync skips it. It never reaches Postgres, cloud API responses, logs, or caches. Search coverage names the exclusion instead of dropping those notes silently.
Local vs cloud
That boundary is tested on every release.