Read your files, without uploading them.

Point 1Presence at a folder. Nothing is copied unless you press Sync.

Uploading a file leaves a copy on a server — indexed somewhere, possibly forever. That is fine for a single PDF you do not mind sharing. It is unworkable for the years of accumulated notes, research, project folders and PDFs sitting on your machine that you would like 1Presence to be able to read.

Modern browsers — Chrome and Edge — expose a permission-gated way for a web app to read files from a folder on your disk without copying them anywhere. 1Presence uses that. You point at a folder, grant access, and the files stay on your machine. 1Presence opens them on demand, only when a question calls for it, and reads what it needs.

Connecting a folder is not just for the agent — it is for you too. Once a folder is connected, it appears in your vault sidebar under Connected, sitting alongside your cloud notes, Drive and GitHub. You can expand it, walk the whole folder tree, and open any file to read it inline — PDFs, spreadsheets, images, markdown — in the same viewer your vault notes use.

It is the real shift this connector makes: the documents scattered across your laptop become part of the same place you already think and work, browsable in seconds without hunting through Finder or Explorer. And it keeps the promise above — the files are read live from your disk in your browser as you click, never copied in unless you press Sync. You are looking straight at the originals, just from inside 1Presence.

1. Open 1Presence in Chrome or Edge on your laptop.
2. Go to Connectors and choose "Connect Folders" — or press + beside Connected in your vault sidebar.
3. In the browser dialog, select the folder you want to expose.
4. Confirm — the browser asks to "Edit files", which 1Presence uses only for a small hidden marker, never your own files. It now has read access to that folder, and reads from it only when you ask.

You can connect several folders, name them ("Project archive", "Research", "Tax 2025"), and grant access to specific agents only. Permission is yours to revoke any time — remove the folder, revoke from settings, or close the browser. Removing a folder shows exactly what would go — "Synced copies", anything "Edited here since the sync" — with a count on the button before you confirm, and your folder on your computer is untouched.

Want the whole folder in your vault, kept up to date whenever you say? Press Sync on the folder’s row and it copies across — one way, only when you ask, and only what changed since last time. The sync guide covers where it goes, what happens when files meet, and the one small marker it leaves behind. For a single batch you want as a one-off snapshot, Upload Files imports it straight into your vault and memory.

Once connected, your folders appear right in your vault — alongside your notes, uploads, and everything else. You can browse them by name, drill into subfolders, and ask 1Presence to read from them. They are woven into your file access, not a separate read-only window.

This means you can mix local files and vault files in the same conversation. "Compare this local PDF with what I wrote about it in my vault." "Search my local Projects folder for anything mentioning Q1 revenue, and add it to my notes." Your vault becomes a unified space for all your files — both stored in the cloud and read live from your machine.

• "Read through this PDF I just downloaded and summarise it."
• "Find every mention of Maya in my Projects folder."
• "What did I write in my journal in March?" (when the journal is a folder on disk)
• "Pull context from my research folder before we discuss this."
• "What are the headlines across last quarter's client decks?"
• Giving 1Presence access to years of notes you have on disk without copying anything.

• Your files are only read. 1Presence never writes over, renames or deletes anything in your local folder. Anything it produces lands in your vault, never on your disk — the one exception is the small hidden marker a sync leaves so the folder recognises itself, which you can decline.
• On demand, or when you press Sync. Files are read at the moment a question needs them, and copied into your vault only when you press Sync. Nothing is pulled, mirrored, or kept in step in the background.
• Browser support. Chrome, Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers. Safari and Firefox do not implement the underlying browser capability yet.
• Access re-confirms. Browsers re-check this kind of access on a schedule for safety, so you may be asked to re-grant a folder after a long gap.
• Mobile. Phone browsers do not currently expose it. Use Drive or another connector to reach the same files from your phone.

No file contents ever leave your machine unless 1Presence specifically reads a file in the course of answering a question, or you press Sync. When it reads a file for a question, what it read is kept with that conversation — never filed in your vault, never shared with another conversation. A sync is the opposite, and deliberate: it copies the folder into your vault, where it is yours to keep, search and open from any device. We never snapshot, mirror, or index your folder on our own.