# LatticeSearch FAQ

Straight answers to the questions people ask most. Where a feature is still maturing, we say so.

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## Privacy and data

### Is it private? Does anything leave my machine?

Yes, it's private, and **no** — nothing leaves your machine. LatticeSearch indexes and searches entirely locally. There is **no cloud service**, no account required to search, and no telemetry sending your files or queries anywhere. Zero network egress is a design goal, not an afterthought — you can confirm it with a firewall rule if you like. This is the deliberate opposite of screen-recording "recall" features: LatticeSearch indexes only what you point it at, and it keeps the results on your disk.

### What does Incognito mode actually protect — and what doesn't it?

Turning on Incognito (the 🕶 button) stops LatticeSearch from recording anything about your session: no recent searches, no activity log, no clipboard capture, no memory writes, no preview history. It leaves **no trace in the lattice.**

Being honest about the boundary: Incognito is **not an anti-forensics tool.** Windows itself still journals activity outside LatticeSearch's control — the NTFS change journal (USN/MFT), event logs, jump lists, and so on. Incognito controls what *LatticeSearch* remembers, not what the operating system records. One deliberate exception: files you delete are still archived to Recovery even in Incognito, because we'd rather protect you from an accidental deletion than leave no trace.

### Where is the index stored?

On your own disk, alongside the app's data. The design keeps the index under your user profile with user-only permissions and encryption at rest; the searchable-but-encrypted **Vault** is available for anything you want sealed behind a passphrase.

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## Hardware and requirements

### Do I need a GPU, an NPU, or a fast PC?

No. LatticeSearch is **CPU-first** — every part of it has a CPU path, and it does **not** require a Copilot+ NPU the way Windows' own semantic search does. If you *have* a compatible GPU, LatticeSearch uses it automatically to speed up the one-time indexing, and it falls back to the CPU gracefully if the GPU is busy or unavailable. Either way you get the same results; the GPU only changes how fast the initial backfill runs.

### Does it need an internet connection?

No. LatticeSearch is **fully offline.** The AI models it uses are bundled and run locally, so search works with your network unplugged.

### How much RAM and disk does it use?

- **Disk:** the models ship quantized to roughly **0.9 GB**, and the index itself is small — the file index compresses to about **20 MB** for shipping and unfolds on install. Image and document indexes are compact (an image is stored as a few hundred bytes of "meaning"). Overall footprint on disk is on the order of ~1 GB installed.
- **RAM:** while running, the current build uses a few hundred MB up to a couple of GB depending on your library size and which senses are loaded. There's a **Lite mode** for low-RAM machines (name search + instant explorer, with the heavier meaning models turned off). The forthcoming native build brings the resident footprint down substantially. For scale: a ~500,000-file library holds its indexes in **under half a gigabyte of RAM**, memory-mapped.

### How long does the first indexing take?

It's tiered, so you're searching by name within **minutes**. The meaning layers fill in afterward, in the background: images and documents within an hour or so on a typical library, and the heaviest senses (text-in-images/OCR, speech-to-text, scene captions, face grouping) can run for **hours or overnight** on a large collection. It's a **one-time** cost — after that, updates are incremental and quiet.

### Will it slow down my PC or wear out my SSD?

It's built to stay out of your way. Search itself is designed to feel instant, and background indexing yields to you — the meaning models only run when you're not actively searching, and a maintenance pass runs at night when the machine is idle. On SSD wear: indexing mostly **reads** your files (once) rather than writing; the index it produces is small and updates incrementally as files change, so day-to-day write volume is modest. The one-time first-index does read across your library, which is normal disk activity, not a stress test.

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## Multiple users

### How are different users' files kept separate on a shared PC?

LatticeSearch respects **Windows permissions (ACLs).** Run without administrator rights, it indexes only what your account can actually read — your own profile and files — and cannot reach other users' protected folders. So it never surfaces files you wouldn't otherwise be able to open.

Fully separate, isolated per-user indexes running side by side is on the near-term roadmap (the architecture already supports multiple engine instances sharing one model host). Today, the honest position is: it respects the OS's access controls, and for anything you want positively sealed, use the passphrase-protected **Vault.**

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## Deleting and recovering

### If I delete a file through LatticeSearch, can I get it back?

Yes. Deletes done through the app go to the **Recycle Bin** *and* are archived to LatticeSearch's own recovery store. You can restore them from **Deleted files** — even by *describing* them rather than remembering the name — and they come back byte-identical. Recoverable files are kept for **90 days.** (Recovery covers deletions that went through LatticeSearch; it can't recover files removed by unrelated tools it never saw.)

### What's the "forget window"?

That's a separate thing from file recovery — it's about your **recent searches.** When you remove a recent search (the ✕ next to it, or Clear all), it enters a grace period: search it again within **7 days** and it comes back; after 7 days it's purged permanently. You can change this window in Settings.

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## Platforms and editions

### Does it run on Windows, Mac, and Linux?

**Windows** is the primary, shipping target — it uses Windows' fast file-system journals for near-instant, whole-drive indexing and live updates.

**Mac and Linux** are supported through the cross-platform native build (it uses the equivalent OS mechanisms — FSEvents on Mac, inotify on Linux — for change tracking). That build is the path to full desktop parity on those platforms.

### Is there a server or NAS edition?

Yes — there's a **headless build** that runs without a desktop, which is what a server or NAS scenario needs. In testing it indexed **700,000+ files in about 17 seconds** and answered searches in 10–22 ms while using roughly **360 MB of RAM**, bound to localhost only. You reach its interface over a browser or an SSH tunnel.

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## Using it with AI

### Can my AI assistant search my files through LatticeSearch?

Yes — that's a first-class feature. LatticeSearch exposes an **MCP server** and a **CLI**, so assistants like Claude (Desktop and Code), Cursor, and other agents can use it as their eyes and hands into your machine. Instead of blindly walking and reading files, the agent asks LatticeSearch for what it *means* and gets ranked results in milliseconds. Measured against naive grep-and-read loops, that's about **44× fewer tokens and 12× faster** per task — and everything stays local. The **AI Access** page generates the exact, copy-paste setup for your machine. See the Help guide's "Connecting an AI" section for steps.

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## Pricing and licensing

### What does it cost? What's the difference between Free and Pro?

LatticeSearch is a **one-time purchase — no required subscription.**

- **Free** lets you try LatticeSearch and covers the core instant search experience.
- **Pro** is a **one-time $129** license that unlocks the full local product — whole-drive search across every sense, plus the toolset (Reclaim Space, Backup, Lattice Sync, Vault, AI Access, and more).
- A per-seat **Business** option exists for teams, and for anyone who prefers to pay over time there's an optional subscription — but you never *have* to subscribe to keep using what you bought.

A Pro purchase is perpetual and includes a period of updates; you keep the version you have forever, and major future versions may be offered as a discounted paid upgrade. Exact tier boundaries are being finalized around launch.

### How does the license work offline?

The license is verified **offline** — it's cryptographically signed and tied to your machine, so it keeps working with no internet connection (with a grace period if you're offline for a while). No file data or usage is sent anywhere; an online check, if it happens at all, only asks whether a license was revoked (for example after a refund).

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## Troubleshooting

### The app says the engine is offline / "connected" dot is red

The search engine runs as a small local background process, and a **watchdog keeps it alive** — if it stops, the watchdog relaunches it automatically (it polls about once a minute and restarts after a couple of missed beats). The connection dot in the top bar turns green again once it's back. If it stays red for more than a minute or two, restart the app (or run the launcher) to bring the engine back up.

### The quick-search palette is blank

The palette reloads its page every time you open it, so a blank palette is almost always a momentary state while the engine is restarting. Close it (**Esc**) and reopen with **Ctrl+Alt+Space**. If it's still blank, the engine may be mid-restart — wait a few seconds for the connection dot to go green, then try again.

### My search results look stale / a new file isn't showing up

LatticeSearch serves listings and name results from its index. New files are normally picked up within seconds by the live watcher, but if something's missing:

- Re-scan the drive from **More → Drives** (⚡ Index drive), which rebuilds the name index in the background.
- The app also guards against staleness on its own — if the index hasn't been refreshed in over a day, it kicks off a background rescan at startup.
- Remember the tiers: a brand-new file may be findable **by name** before its **meaning** has been indexed. Give the background senses a moment to catch up.

### The Ctrl+Alt+Space hotkey doesn't work

Ctrl+Alt+Space is the global palette hotkey. If another application has claimed the same combination, it may win the keypress. Check the current hotkey under **⚙ Settings → System**, and close or reconfigure any other tool competing for that shortcut. You can always reach the same search from the main window's search bar.
