Sessions and resuming

Autosave

Your labels are saved continuously — there is no save button and no “unsaved changes” state. The session records which record you were on, every label you have entered, and your session answers.

It is keyed to the pair of config and input file. Opening a different data file, or the same file with a different config, is a different session.

Only one session is kept at a time. Starting work on a different file replaces it.

Resuming

Reopen the same config and data file and MLabel offers to restore your progress. Decline and you start clean — the saved session is discarded.

The prompt only appears when there is something worth restoring. A session that matches what the file would load anyway — because every value in it was auto-copied rather than entered by you — is not offered, since restoring it would change nothing.

“This file has changed”

MLabel fingerprints the source file by content when it saves. On resume, it compares.

If the file has changed since you last worked on it, the dialog says so. Restoring anyway is allowed but rarely what you want: labels are stored by row position, so if rows were added, removed or reordered, your labels will land on the wrong records.

The fingerprint compares size and content hash only — not the modification time. Re-downloading a byte-identical file does not read as a change.

Note

Sessions written by an older version of MLabel are discarded rather than trusted. The file holds typed values whose meaning depends on the config schema, and a mismatched read is worse than starting fresh.

Where it lives

Platform	Path
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/MLabel/session.json
Windows	%APPDATA%\MLabel\session.json

Deleting the file discards the session. Nothing else is affected — your data files and exports are untouched.

Writes are atomic and flushed to disk, and a save immediately followed by a clear can never race. A crash mid-write leaves the previous session intact rather than a truncated file.

Exporting clears the session

A successful export deletes the saved session. Your files on disk are now the record of the work, so there is nothing left to resume.

Your labels are still in memory, so Keep editing returns you to the same records with everything in place — and the moment you change anything, a fresh session starts saving again.

The one gap worth knowing: between a successful export and your next edit, there is no saved session. Quitting in that window and reopening the same files offers nothing to resume. Your exported *-output and *-remaining files are unaffected, and reloading *-remaining picks the work back up.

A failed export leaves the session completely untouched.