Guide
How to find something you saved months ago
You know it exists. You know roughly what it was. You have no idea what it was called, and three keyword guesses have failed.
Most people give up here. The material is almost always still there; you're just entering through the wrong door.
01 · Move one
Start with time, because you remember it better than words.
You rarely recall a filename, but you can usually place a thing within a season: before the launch, during the trip, the week that client called. That's a coarse filter and it removes ninety percent of a library instantly.
Sort by date, jump to the period, and scan. Scanning two hundred items from the right fortnight is faster than any query against the whole archive.
02 · Move two
Narrow by what it belonged to.
Almost everything worth keeping belonged to a piece of work. The project is a stronger memory than the content, because you lived inside it for weeks.
If your tool can filter by source, app, site or collection, use it here rather than at the start; it's a narrowing move, not an opening one.
- Source
- Where it came from: a site, a document, a colleague.
- Kind
- Screenshot, PDF, link, note. Cheap and often decisive.
- Neighbours
- Find one nearby thing you do remember, then look around it.
03 · Move three
Use appearance when words fail.
If it was visual, describe it visually: dark, a table, a diagram, a big serif headline. Visual memory is often intact long after verbal memory has gone, and a grid of thumbnails converts that into recognition.
This is the move most people never make, because most software offers no way to make it.
Don't search harder. Change the kind of clue you're using.
04 · Move four
Search meaning, not keywords.
When you do type something, describe the idea rather than guessing the phrasing: "argument that onboarding checklists hurt retention" rather than "onboarding". Semantic search matches on subject and will tolerate you using entirely different words from the source.
Then chain: from whatever you land on, look at what it's connected to. Reconstruction usually finishes with a neighbour, not a hit.
05 · Where Shelf fits
All four moves, in one place.
This sequence is exactly the interface Shelf is built around: browse by time, filter by source and kind, scan visually, search by meaning, then follow connections with the evidence for each one shown.
It's also fine advice if you never install anything. The method matters more than the tool.
If this idea interested you…
Shelf V3 is out now
Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.
This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.
Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.