How do watched folders work?

Pick a folder. Anything that lands in it becomes a note. That’s the whole feature.

It exists for the job nobody enjoys: a stack of paper, a scanner, and an evening spent dragging files into an app one at a time. Point Harbor at the folder your scanner writes to, scan the stack, walk away. The notes are waiting for you — filed in the right notebook, tagged, and searchable by the words inside them.

Two kinds of folder, and the difference matters

A folder on this Mac or this PC. The Harbor app on that computer does the watching, so files are imported while the app is running. The watch belongs to that one computer — it isn’t synced to your other devices, and setting one up on your Mac doesn’t create one on your phone.

A folder in Google Drive or Dropbox. Harbor’s servers do the watching, so files are imported whether or not you’re signed in anywhere — app closed, laptop shut, phone in a drawer. Connect the service once under Settings → Connections and it keeps going on its own.

If you want imports to happen unattended, use a Drive or Dropbox folder. Most scanners can save straight into one, and it’s the setup that keeps working when you forget about it.

Where to find it, and what each app can watch

Look under Settings → Watched folders. What you can watch depends on the app:

• Mac and Windows — local folders and Google Drive and Dropbox folders.
• Web, iPhone, iPad, and Android — Google Drive and Dropbox folders only. A browser can’t watch a folder on your disk, and phones don’t really have that kind of folder, so there’s no local option on those four.
• The harbor CLI — no watched-folder commands at all.

A folder you set up in one place shows up everywhere, as long as it’s a Drive or Dropbox folder — those live with your account. Local folders stay on the computer that owns them.

Setting one up

1. Go to Settings → Watched folders and choose Connect a folder.
2. Pick where the folder is — This Mac (or this PC), Google Drive, or Dropbox.
3. Choose the folder itself.
4. Choose the notebook imported notes are filed in, and any tags to apply to every one of them.
5. Decide whether the original file is deleted after it’s uploaded.
6. Turn Watching on.

A new folder starts paused, and that’s deliberate. Turning Watching on is also what tells Harbor to sweep up the files already sitting in the folder — so if it started watching the moment you picked it, a folder with two hundred old scans in it would empty itself into your default notebook before you’d chosen anything. Configure first, then switch it on.

If Google shows you a warning about an unverified app while you’re connecting Drive, that’s Google’s screen rather than a fault in Harbor. Reading files out of a folder is a permission Google reviews carefully, and that review runs on its own timeline. You can continue past the warning to finish connecting, or stop there and use a Dropbox folder or a local folder instead — they do the same job. Nothing about how watched folders behave changes either way.

What gets imported

Images and PDFs, from the top level of the folder only. Subfolders are never followed. Anything else — a spreadsheet, a .docx, a zip — is left alone.

Each file becomes one note with the file embedded in it, and the note is named after the file. A scanner that produces scan_0042.pdf gives you a note called scan_0042.pdf. If you’d rather it were called something useful, open the note and press Suggest title — Harbor reads the scan and proposes a real title.

Every import goes through OCR, so the words inside the scan are searchable a little while after it arrives, and search highlights the match on the page.

Two ceilings worth knowing about. Files over 50 MB are skipped from a Drive or Dropbox folder rather than imported. And a watched folder is held to the same limits as everything else — if your account is at its note cap, imports stop and the folder tells you so, rather than quietly growing past the limit.

“Delete the file after it’s uploaded”

Off unless you turn it on. What it does depends on which kind of folder it is, and the difference is worth reading twice:

• Google Drive and Dropbox — the file is moved to the service’s own trash once Harbor confirms the import. Drive’s trash and Dropbox’s deleted files are both recoverable for a while, so a mistake here is fixable.
• A folder on your Mac or PC — the file is deleted outright. It does not go to the Trash or the Recycle Bin. If the only copy of a document is in that folder, the only copy afterwards is the one inside Harbor.

Leave it off and the file stays where it is. Harbor marks it as done, so it’s never imported a second time.

Pause Watching to change a folder’s settings

This is the one that catches people out. While Watching is on, the notebook, the tags and the delete toggle are locked. The app greys them out and tells you to pause Watching to change them.

Turn Watching off, make the change, turn it back on. Nothing is lost — and switching it back on runs the catch-up sweep again, so anything that arrived while it was paused comes in with the settings you just chose.

The reason is unglamorous: an import already in flight must not have its destination changed underneath it, or half a stack of scans ends up in one notebook and half in another.

How quickly things show up

Drive and Dropbox folders are checked every couple of minutes. If you don’t want to wait, Check now sweeps every folder immediately.

Local folders on a Mac or PC react almost as soon as the file appears, with a brief pause first so a file that’s still being written — a scan mid-page, a large copy — is picked up once it’s finished rather than half-done.

When a folder stops working

A folder that can’t import turns red and says why: the folder was deleted or renamed at the source, the notebook it filed into is gone, or the connection to Google or Dropbox was revoked. Harbor emails you once when that happens, not once per file.

Fix the cause — reconnect the service, pick a different notebook — and it heals itself on the next sweep. Turning Watching off and on again forces the issue.

Two limits to know before you set one up

Most watched folders can’t file into a notebook that encrypts by default. A Drive or Dropbox folder is imported by Harbor’s servers, and they’d have to hold your plaintext to do it — which is exactly what encryption is designed to prevent. Harbor refuses the setup rather than quietly filing those notes unencrypted. The one place it does work is a local folder on a Mac: that import runs in the app on your machine, which holds your key, so it can encrypt on the way in. A local folder on Windows can’t yet, and says so when you pick the notebook.

Nothing is ever imported twice. Harbor remembers every file a folder has processed, and it recognizes an identical file dropped in again under a new name. Re-running a catch-up sweep is always safe.

What we’d actually do with it

Make a folder called Scans, point your scanner at it, and give it a notebook called Paperwork and a scan tag. Leave “delete after upload” off for the first week — you’ll trust it faster if you can see the originals piling up untouched.

Then scan the drawer. The whole drawer. That’s the point of the thing: the effort per document drops to putting it face-down and pressing a button, and OCR makes the pile searchable whether or not you ever gave any of it a sensible name.