💾 Saving: Celestory doesn't do it for you

⚠️ Let's start with the most important part, before any explanation: Celestory never saves on its own. No auto-save, no local draft, no small "• Unsaved changes" indicator anywhere, and no warning at all if you close the tab with two hours of work in progress.

You close the page, you lose everything that wasn't saved. No question, no safety net, no message.

This isn't a bug: it's simply a tool that doesn't work like Google Docs or Notion. So you need to build a habit — and this article exists only for that.

🔴 The habit to build

Cmd + S (Ctrl + S on Windows), often. Every ten minutes, and systematically before:

• closing the tab or the window;
• testing your app with the Play button;
• going to lunch, putting the computer to sleep, clicking an external link;
• going back to the Creator's home screen.

That's it. The rest of the article explains why this habit isn't negotiable.

🖱️ Where the button is

In the top bar, between the Undo / Redo buttons and the Publish and Share buttons.

🔺 Careful, it's an icon-only save button, with no text label. Its immediate neighbours, on the other hand, do display their name written out ("Publish", "Share"). The single most important button in the interface is therefore the only one in the group that says nothing — hover over it to see its tooltip: "Save graph in the cloud."

On mobile, it sits at the top right, next to the Play button, also as an icon alone.

🔺 The button never changes appearance. Whether it's been ten seconds or four hours of unsaved work, it looks exactly the same. You cannot tell, by looking at the screen, whether your project is up to date or not.

⌨️ The shortcut works — but not everywhere

Cmd + S / Ctrl + S is properly wired up, unlike five other shortcuts advertised in the interface that trigger nothing at all.

⚠️ But it is ignored while your cursor sits inside a text field. This is the tool's nastiest trap: you've just typed a long line into a Dialogue block, the cursor is still blinking in the field, you hit Cmd + S out of reflex… and Celestory does nothing. Worse: since the tool lets the keystroke pass through, it's the browser that reacts and offers to save the web page.

If a Chrome "Save Page As…" window pops up, that's the signal that your project wasn't saved. Cancel it, click somewhere else to leave the field, and try Cmd + S again.

🧨 The three moments people lose their work

1. Closing the tab.
No warning exists anywhere in the code: not when closing the tab, not when leaving the project for the Creator's home screen, not when switching pages. The browser will not ask "Are you sure you want to leave?". It closes, and that's it.

2. Testing, then leaving.
⚠️ The Play button doesn't save. It opens a test window running on whatever is in your browser's memory, without sending anything to the server. The classic scenario: you tweak, you test, it works, you're happy, you close the tab — and you never saved a single time.

3. The interruption.
Tab closed by mistake, browser crash, computer update, dead battery. Nothing is kept locally: Celestory keeps no draft of your project on your machine. What never made it to the server exists nowhere.

🕰️ History is not a backup

This is the costliest confusion, so let's be blunt about it.

🔺 The History window (Cmd + Shift + H) only lives inside the open tab. It is never sent to the server, and it empties entirely the moment you close the project. It's the same stack as Cmd + Z: a safety net for your last few minutes of mistakes, not a version system.

🔺 And on the server side, there is no earlier version of your project at all. Every save simply overwrites the previous one: the server keeps a single state, the last one saved. There is nothing to restore, not for you, not for support.

In other words: if a piece of work was never saved, it exists nowhere, and no feature of Celestory can bring it back.

📦 What a save actually sends (and what's already gone)

A Cmd + S sends the whole project at once: your graphs and all their modules, the menus, the variables and their groups, the labels, the translations, the analytics settings, the integrations and the publishing options. There is no "save just the current module" — it's the entire project, every time.

One important, and rather reassuring, exception:

🔺 Files in the media library don't follow this rule. When you drop an image, a sound or a video into the project's Files, the file is sent to the server immediately, independently of any save. A successful upload is locked in, even if you close the tab right after.

⚠️ The flip side: the same is true of deletions. Deleting or renaming a file in the media library takes effect on the server right away, and these operations don't go through History: neither Cmd + Z nor the History window will undo them. A deleted file is deleted.

The takeaway: your media is safe as soon as it's uploaded; your authoring work (graph, menus, variables, text) only becomes safe after a Cmd + S.

👥 Several people on the same project: last one in, last one served

A project can be shared with edit rights. But Celestory has no collaboration features whatsoever: no real-time editing, no locking, no indication of who's currently working, and above all no conflict detection.

⚠️ If two people open the same project and each save from their own side, the last save entirely overwrites the first one, silently. No warning is shown, and the overwritten work cannot be recovered.

🔺 Survival rule: one person at a time in a shared project. Agree on that out loud before opening it.

✅ Checking that it worked

Saving shows a "Saving project…" banner, then replaces it with a green confirmation message.

🔺 Don't be surprised: this success message displays in English ("Project saved") even when your whole interface is set to another language. It's a missing translation, not an error — it's still the sign that everything went fine.

Two possible refusals worth knowing about:

• "You don't have the permission to save this project": you were given read-only access to the project. Nothing you've done can be saved here. The message offers a way out: Copy project, so you can start over with your own copy.
• A refusal tied to the free trial: after fifteen days without a subscription, the server refuses saves. You can keep working in the editor, but nothing can be saved.

⚠️ In both cases, the refusal only arrives at the moment you save — so, after the work is done. If you open a shared project, do an empty Cmd + S within the first minute to know right away where you stand.

🧠 The four-line summary

• Nothing is automatic. No auto-save, no draft, no warning.
• Play doesn't save. Save before testing, not after.
• History dies with the tab. It's not a version system.
• Cmd + S every ten minutes, and click outside any text field first.

→ Next step: your project is saved, and now you want to show it off. Head to Publishing Isn't Sharing, because those two neighbouring buttons don't do the same thing at all.

Updated on: 23/09/2026