# Workspace recording

> Record everything a workspace shows — every terminal, the canvas, browser and other cards — and replay it later on a timeline, without a single new model request.

Source: https://docs.neurosquad.ai/en/canvas/recording

A **recording** keeps everything one workspace shows while it runs: every byte each terminal
printed, the canvas with its cards, frames and arrows, notes and to-do lists, what the browser cards
showed and pictures of the other cards. Later you **replay** it in NeuroSquad on a timeline — the
terminals exactly as they were, at any speed, with no agent running and no model request sent.

Good for showing a colleague how a run went, comparing agents on the same task after the fact,
recording a demo with a screen recorder at your own pace, or attaching what happened to a bug
report.

Requires NeuroSquad 0.1.264 or newer.

## Record

**1. Open the workspace you want to record**

One workspace is recorded at a time.

**2. Canvas tools → Start recording**

The canvas tools menu is the sliders button at the top right of the canvas. A red
**Recording** chip with the elapsed time appears in the title bar and stays there while the
recording runs.

**3. Work as usual**

Recording changes nothing about how agents and cards behave.

**4. Stop**

Press the red chip, or **Canvas tools → Stop recording**. Quitting NeuroSquad also stops it.

A terminal that was already running when you started begins from its current screen and the last
few hundred lines of scrollback, not its full history. To record a run from its very first line,
start recording before you give the agents their prompts.

## Replay

**Canvas tools → Recordings…** lists your recordings, newest first: workspace, date, length, size,
number of cards and status (**Complete**, or **Recovered** for one that was cut off). **Replay**
opens it; the trash button deletes it right away, without asking.

The player fills the window with a read-only copy of the canvas — the same layout, frames and
arrows, panned and zoomed the way your window was:

- **Terminals** replay byte for byte, colours, cursor and resizes included.
- **Browser cards** show the page as the card showed it at that moment.
- **Notes and to-do lists** show their text of that moment.
- **Other cards** (Run Stats, Agent Pulse, community cards and the rest) show a picture of the card,
taken about once a second while it was on screen.

| Control | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| **Play** / **Pause**, `Space` | Start and stop playback |
| **Playback speed** | 1×, 2×, 4×, 8×, 16×, 32× or 64× |
| Timeline | Drag or click to jump. Ticks mark prompts sent, finishes, "needs your input" and markers added by scripts |
| **Previous marker** / **Next marker** | Jump between those ticks |
| `←` / `→` | Back or forward 5 seconds |
| **Clean view** | Hides all controls and shows the canvas at exactly the size of your live canvas — for a screen recorder. `Esc` brings the controls back |
| `Esc` | Closes the player |

Nothing in the player is live: no agent is started, nothing is typed into a terminal, nothing is sent
to a model.

## What it does not capture

- Hover, selection, scrolling inside a card, menus, tooltips, toasts and the mouse pointer.
- Browser pages and card pictures only while that card was on screen and the canvas was not zoomed
out to the overview — exactly what you saw. Pictures are taken about once a second.
- Pan and zoom are sampled once a second. [Grid mode](https://docs.neurosquad.ai/en/canvas/grid-mode) is replayed as the canvas.
- Each card in the player wears the shared card header, not every button of the live one.

## Where recordings are kept

In a `recordings` folder inside [NeuroSquad's data folder](https://docs.neurosquad.ai/en/help/data), one folder per workspace and
recording. To keep them somewhere else — a bigger disk, say — set the environment variable
`NEUROSQUAD_RECORDINGS_DIR` to a folder before starting NeuroSquad. When a script starts a recording
with a folder of its own, NeuroSquad keeps using that folder for the next ones.

A recording with busy terminals and browser cards grows quickly. Once a recording passes 5 GB, or the
disk has less than 2 GB free, NeuroSquad stops saving browser frames and card pictures; terminals keep
recording.

Recordings are written as they happen and flushed to disk every few seconds, so a crash or power cut
loses at most the last moments: the next time you open **Recordings…**, the cut-off one is marked
**Recovered** and plays up to where it stopped.

## Privacy

> A recording contains everything the workspace showed **and every key typed into its terminals —
> including passwords typed into a shell**. Treat a recording file like the screen it came from.

- Recordings stay on your computer. NeuroSquad never uploads them.
- Keys you enter in NeuroSquad's own dialogs (provider keys, SSH passwords) are not terminal input
and are not recorded.
- The red chip is always visible while a recording runs; hover it for a reminder of what is saved.
- Recording can't be started or stopped from your phone.
- Delete a recording from **Recordings…**, or delete its folder.