RAM Folder — Help Center
Answers to the questions users actually ask, with special attention to the behaviors that are easy to misunderstand: where your data really lives, what syncing the RAM folder does and does not protect you from, and what happens when things go wrong.
Start here
If you read only one page, read Synchronization. Almost every surprising behavior in the app follows from the model explained there.
Contents
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Getting started | First launch, the background helper approval, menu-bar vs. dock mode, trial and licensing |
| Creating your first RAM folder | Choosing a folder, setting a size ceiling, and creating the disk |
| RAM Folder configuration | The Normal options — Sync RAM folder, periodic snapshots, Mount at launch, hiding from Finder |
| Synchronization | The three copies of your data, why your folder “disappears” while mounted, which files are never synced |
| Data safety | Syncing the RAM folder, periodic sync, crashes and power loss, failed saves, recovering files by hand |
| Mounting & ejecting | Mount at launch, apps blocking eject, Finder eject behavior, quitting with mounted disks |
| Advanced options | tmpfs, FSEvents, the file comparison method, remote storage, what the saved data targets |
| Memory & sizing | How much RAM a disk really uses, size limits, resizing, the Memory Gauge |
| Troubleshooting | Full Disk Access, reserved locations, helper problems, common error messages |
| Remote storage | S3-compatible providers, how to attach one, and what happens offline |
| Command line | Installing ram-folder, its commands, and its deliberate
limits |
The three rules worth memorizing
- While a RAM folder is mounted, everything you see at its path lives in RAM. The folder on your SSD underneath is hidden and unchanged until a save runs.
- While a RAM folder is unmounted, the folder on disk is the source of truth. Anything you add, change, or delete there — deletions included — is what the next mount starts from.
- A save happens at unmount (and via periodic snapshots), not continuously. If the machine loses power while a disk is mounted, the work since the last save exists nowhere on disk — with one important partial exception covered in Data safety.