HOW TO — 4 / 6
AKARI Video doesn't lock your work inside a special app. Everything sits on your computer as ordinary files and folders. This page is a one-sheet map of “what lives where, and who touches it”. The answers on backing up and moving are here too.
1 — Three places
/Applications/AKARI Video.app
~/.akari/cli/
The engine and the whole toolset (the app build and the CLI build). Nobody touches what's inside. An update replaces all of it. Nothing you'd be sad to lose is in here.
~/.akari/
~/.akari/credentials.env
Update caches, tools and settings, plus credentials such as API keys. A hidden folder that only the app touches. Secrets are kept here, apart from your workspace.
~/Akari/
All of your work and memory. You and the AI touch this. Updates can't break it. This is the only thing you need to back up. It's self-contained in one folder.
Think of a game console: the app is the console and the game (fine to replace), the machine's state is the system settings (accounts and so on), and the workspace is the save data (the only treasure).
On Windows it's the same three-way split. The default workspace is C:\Users\<name>\Akari\. It sits directly under your home folder rather than in “Documents” so that OneDrive's automatic sync doesn't swallow your video footage.
2 — Who may write
Files in the workspace fall into four colors by who may write to them. This color-coding is the heart of how AKARI Video earns trust.
The most important one is green: the AI never writes to the footage you shot (inbox/ and each project's assets/). Purple is co-writing, where “the AI types and you give the OK”, so you never have to write a settings file yourself.
3 — Inside the workspace
~/Akari/The app creates the workspace automatically on first launch (you never have to dig the folders yourself). Here is what's inside:
The only units you normally see on screen are “projects” and “channels”. The formal name in the spec is the “workspace (creator-root)”. For details, see the contract document on GitHub.
Some things belong to neither a project nor the workspace and live in ~/.akari/ on the machine.
~/.akari/playbooks/ — your local shelf of playbooks and templates. Example playbooks you install from Lab land here too. When you start from a playbook, it looks in this order: the channel's shelf, then the local shelf~/.akari/kits/ — the ledger and contents of kits you installed from Lab (a mark of where something came from)~/.akari/assets/ — where your own assets live when there's no workspace (when there is one, they go in the workspace's library/)4 — Inside one video
One video = one folder. Everything it needs is inside, so you can move, share or delete it on its own.
.akari/| Location | Role |
|---|---|
| .akari/intake.json | How to proceed (what to do, length, how much to delegate) and the language of the video's contents |
| .akari/manifest.json | The dependency list. Records what is involved and at which version (akari project sync / check) |
| .akari/events/ | Milestone records. The “pick up where you left off” cue and the AI's “what it did” and pending confirmations are kept here |
| .akari/memory/ | This project's memory (the word list and so on) |
| .akari/reports/ | Verification evidence and reports (don't delete) |
| .akari/cache/ | Caches such as thumbnails and proxies (regenerated if removed) |
A project you want to split into several scenes can have scenes/ (akari project scene add <id>). Each scene has the same layout as a single project. The full list is in the project structure on GitHub.
5 — What you can delete
akari cleanIf disk space worries you, run akari clean in the project folder. It lists what can be deleted, what stays, and what it leaves for you to decide, with sizes. By default it deletes nothing (and even after you approve, it removes only what is deletable).
.akari/cache/, .akari/render-tmp/ and .akari/diffs/, and intermediate export filesedit.json, captions.json, review.json, assets/, planning/, the exports/*.mp4 you deliver, .akari/reports/ and .akari/events/assets/ don't go into the history)6 — Moving, backing up, importing
Copy ~/Akari/ as is to a new computer or an external SSD and the move is done. Reinstall the app and tell it where the folder is. A backup works the same way: take the whole folder.
For a trial, you can create a project in any ordinary folder and use it there (the terminal steps in Install do this). Features that span the workspace, such as the project list and channel memory, won't work though.
A project made elsewhere becomes part of the workspace once you move the whole folder into videos/. Just a move, no conversion. You can also do it from “Add this project to a channel” in the app.
Credentials such as API keys live only on the machine-state side (~/.akari/credentials.env). The workspace is designed so you can share or back up the whole thing without leaking secrets.