unottr has no import button you need to remember, no bot to invite and no sync to wait for. The unit of work is a file in a folder. This post follows a recording from the moment it is saved to the moment it is safely backed up, and shows where the pieces in between fit.
1. Save recordings where unottr is watching
Pick a folder in Settings under Recording & imports. Any recording tool that can save to a folder now feeds unottr: a screen recorder, a phone app syncing to your computer, an export from a conferencing tool. On Linux you can also record a screen or window from inside the app, with microphone and computer-audio meters and a preview before you start.
Each new file is probed, transcribed and speaker-labelled on its own. The library and the queue shelf show what is finished, what is running and how long it has left. The watcher waits until a file has stopped being written, so a long copy does not get transcribed in half.
Importing a single file still works for anything outside the folder.
2. Keep meetings in projects
Projects are scopes, not folders. Pick one from the sidebar and Library, search, Tasks and new Ask threads all narrow to it. A client, a product line or a research study each becomes a project, and an empty project does not quietly fall back to searching everything.
Recordings move between projects in bulk, with Undo. Removing a project moves its recordings to Unfiled rather than deleting anything.
3. Name people once
When a speaker is named, later recordings recognise them by voiceprint. Over a few weeks, a project full of client calls has the right names on every turn without any further work. If the automatic split is wrong, merge two speakers, reassign a segment, or run speaker identification again without retranscribing.
4. Let notes land in your own files
Point unottr at an existing notes folder and it mirrors a Markdown note per recording: the title, overview, decisions and tasks, with personal notes beside the transcript. Edits to transcript text, titles, bookmarks, tasks and speakers update the mirror without generating any new AI output.
The mirror respects your files. If you edit a note outside unottr, automatic updates preserve your version and offer to save a separate copy instead. A disconnected drive or a failed write leaves the transcript usable and offers Retry. Notes and the original media are independent files, so a tool like Obsidian or a plain grep sees them without unottr running.
Transcripts also export or copy as txt, json, srt and vtt whenever a deliverable needs one.
5. Make a backup that is actually verified
Settings, Advanced, Create backup. unottr writes a copy of the library, strips provider credentials from it, then opens the copy and verifies it before reporting “Backup verified and saved”. Restoring from a backup restarts the app into the restored library and keeps a rollback of the previous one.
Backups contain the library: transcripts, speakers, overviews, tasks, Ask threads and settings. Original recordings and mirrored notes are your own files and are deliberately not duplicated inside the backup.
6. Delete deliberately
Deleting a recording’s saved data removes its transcript, summary, tasks, bookmarks and cached media, and the confirmation tells you how many Ask conversations go with it. Hiding a recording from the library is the reversible alternative. The original file in your folder is never touched, and path exclusions stop the watcher from re-importing something you removed on purpose.
That is the loop: save a file, let the folder do the work, keep the output in files you own, and back up the library that ties them together.
