Your data

bettersense’s memory holds career-sensitive material: candid reflections on named colleagues, performance concerns, promotion drafts, your own self-assessments. You should know exactly where that lives and what touches it. This page is the complete answer.

What is stored, and where

Everything private lives in one directory: ~/bettersense-work-reflections/ (or wherever $BETTERSENSE_WORK_REFLECTIONS_HOME points). Profile, strategy docs, stakeholder reflections, self-reflections, wins, pulses, team charters — all of it. See File locations for the full map.

• Plaintext markdown and JSON. No proprietary format, no database. You can read every file in any editor, grep it, or take it with you. If you stop using bettersense tomorrow, you lose nothing.
• Local only. The plugin never transmits, syncs, or phones home. There is no bettersense server, no account, no telemetry.
• Not touched by uninstall. Removing the plugin removes skills, never your data.

When data leaves your machine

Two cases, both under your control:

1. Your own Claude usage. When a skill reads a reflection file to prepare your 1:1, that content enters your Claude conversation and is processed by Anthropic per your own Claude Code account settings — the same as any file you’d ask Claude to read. bettersense adds no path beyond the Claude usage you already have. Skills that handle sensitive aggregates (like product-pulse) default to redacted/aggregated data.
2. Backups you choose. If you put the directory in Dropbox, or push it to a git remote, that host has your data. bettersense never does this for you; doctor will warn you if it notices the directory is in a cloud-synced path, so the choice is deliberate.

Protections in place

• A .gitignore is written into the directory on first run, so it can’t be swept accidentally into a repository you’re committing.
• A README.md privacy warning sits at the directory root for anyone (including future you) who stumbles on it.
• Skills follow a write-once/append-only discipline — reflections and pulses are dated entries, so nothing silently rewrites your history.

Back it up

This directory becomes more valuable every month you use it — which means losing it gets worse every month too. Run:

/bettersense:doctor

It checks the directory’s health (registry integrity, orphaned files, layout drift) and offers two backup paths: a one-command dated snapshot (tar), or git init with a private remote for versioned history. It will also tell you when your last backup is stale.

For encryption at rest, rely on full-disk encryption (FileVault on macOS, LUKS on Linux, BitLocker on Windows) — it covers this directory like everything else you care about.

Delete it

It’s one directory. rm -rf ~/bettersense-work-reflections and it is gone — bettersense keeps no other copy anywhere. (Take a snapshot first; doctor makes that one command.)