Your screen recording should stay on your computer

A screen recording is the most revealing file most people ever make. It holds whatever was on screen: the open tabs, an inbox, names in a chat, a customer’s record, source code, a password typed while it was recording, and on top of that your voice and often your face. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, is built on the view that a file like that belongs on your computer. It has no account, no sign-in, no telemetry and no crash reporting, and it makes and keeps recordings, edits and captions on your own disk, in folders you can open.

My name is Vince, and I make Focal. More than once, the most interesting thing in one of my own recordings was not the feature I was showing but the inbox I forgot to close. Here is what Focal keeps, the four things it sends, and where its protection stops and yours starts.

Why most screen recorders upload

Many of the popular recorders are built around a link. You stop recording, the video is already on the vendor’s servers, and a link to it is on your clipboard. The link is the product: the viewer page, the comments, the count of who watched and for how long. None of that works unless the video lives on someone else’s computer, so the upload is not a side effect. It is the design. So is the account, which tells the servers whose video they are holding.

For a team that trades quick updates all day, that is a good trade, and I say so in Focal vs Loom. It is a bad trade when the recording shows a client’s data or code that is not public yet, or when all you wanted was a video file. Storing everyone’s videos also costs money every month, which is part of why so many recorders are subscriptions. Focal stores nothing of yours, which is one of the reasons it costs $99 once.

So Focal has no share links, no viewer analytics and no team workspace. You get an MP4 or a GIF, and you decide where it goes, which used to be the entire job description of a file.

What Focal sends, item by item

Four things leave your computer, and nothing else. The privacy note has every detail, down to each folder and registry entry.

The license check. During the trial, nothing is sent. Once you enter a license key, Focal sends it to Polar, the store Focal is sold through, to activate it on that computer, then about once a day to confirm it is still valid, and again when you press Deactivate. Each request carries the key, Focal’s id at Polar, your computer’s name as Windows knows it (so you can tell your computers apart in Polar’s customer portal), a fingerprint of the computer and your IP address. The fingerprint is a one-way hash of the id Windows gives its installation. It ties the activation to that computer, and it cannot be turned back into the id. Polar’s answer includes the email you bought with, which Settings shows you. A licensed copy works for 28 days without a connection. After that, exporting pauses until a check succeeds, and recording and editing carry on.

The update check. With “Check for updates automatically” on in Settings, which it is to begin with, Focal fetches a small file from releases.focalcapture.com shortly after it starts and once a day after that, never during a recording or an export. The request carries your IP address, as every web request does, and the fact that it comes from an updater. It says nothing about you or your recordings. When you accept an update, the new installer is downloaded from GitHub, where Focal’s releases are published. Turn the check off and nothing is fetched unless you press “Check for updates”.

The speech model, downloaded once. The first time you make captions, Focal downloads a speech model of about 190 MB from the site where its makers publish it and keeps it in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Focal\models. Languages other than English need a second model of the same size.

Microsoft’s web view component, during installation. Focal’s windows run in Microsoft’s web view component, which Windows 11 includes. Where it is missing, the installer downloads it from Microsoft.

What never leaves: your recordings, your audio, your camera, your captions, your edits, your cursor and keystroke data, and any count of how often you use Focal or what for. There is no telemetry, no usage statistics and no crash reporting. When something goes wrong, Focal shows you a message and writes to a log on your disk, with times, file paths, device names and sizes, never the recording or what you typed. So I hear about bugs the old-fashioned way, when someone writes to tell me, which is a fair price for never looking over your shoulder.

And since you are reading this on one: this website counts its visitors without cookies. What I see is totals, how many came, which pages they read and where from.

Captions without an upload

Automatic captions are where most people expect an upload, because many captioning services work that way: the audio goes to a server, including the part where you muttered at the build, and text comes back. In Focal the speech model runs on your computer, and your audio and your screen never leave it. It reads the words on screen as hints for names and terms, and that happens on your computer too.

After the one download, captions work with the network cable pulled. Correcting lines, saving an .srt and exporting a caption track stay on your computer as well. The steps are in how to add captions to a screen recording without uploading it.

The keystroke setting is the one real choice

Focal always records when keys are pressed, because that timing is how it places zooms around typing and lines the microphone up with the picture. What it keeps about which keys depends on the Keystrokes setting, and this is the one privacy decision Focal leaves to you.

• Off, the default: only the timing of key presses. Nothing you type is recorded.
• Shortcuts: key combinations such as Ctrl+C and the function keys, so they can show as a pill on the video. Plain typing is still timing only.
• Everything: every key and all the text you type, passwords included. It is kept in the recording’s input log whether or not the overlay shows it, so it travels with the recording.

The exported video shows only what the overlay showed. Pack a recording made with Everything into a .focalproj file, though, and the log goes with it, which is why Focal warns you before it exports such a project. Pick Shortcuts or Off before you record anything you would not want written into a file. Sooner or later everyone types a password with a recording running, usually while saying “ignore this part”, and this setting decides whether the input log ignores it too.

Where the files are, and what uninstalling removes

Recordings go to Videos\Focal, or a folder you pick in Settings. Each one is a folder ending in .focal that holds the screen video, the microphone and system audio tracks, the camera video, the cursor and input log, the captions transcript, your edits, and, in its export folder, the videos you export. Deleting a recording in the Projects window moves it to the Recycle Bin. Settings, styles, export presets and the license file live in %APPDATA%\Focal.

Uninstall from Settings > Apps. The uninstaller removes the program, its Start Menu entry and its registry entries. With “Delete app data” checked, it also removes your settings, styles, export presets, the license file, logs, thumbnails, the downloaded speech models and saved window positions. It never touches your recordings: delete those yourself if you want them gone. Versions before 1.5.0, whose trial had a time limit, also kept the trial’s start date in the registry, a date and nothing else, and their uninstaller left it there. The trial has no time limit now, so version 1.5.0 and later remove that date the first time they run. I would rather you read that here than find it in the registry editor one evening.

What this does not protect you from

“On your computer” moves the responsibility to you. Your disk, your backups and your sharing habits are the security now.

• If your Videos folder is backed up to a cloud drive, your recordings go there with it. If that is not what you want, pick a different folder in Settings.
• If your laptop is stolen, the recordings are as readable as everything else on its disk. An encrypted disk is the answer to that, not a screen recorder.
• A .focalproj file is the whole recording: screen, voice, camera, captions and the input log, with every keystroke in it if you recorded with Everything. Share it as you would share the raw recording, because that is what it is.
• Whatever was on screen is in the video, including the tab you forgot was open, which is never the tab you would have chosen. Close the inbox and the extra tabs before you press the shortcut, or record one window or a region instead of the whole monitor. In Chrome and Edge, a window recording can keep only the page.

That is how every file on your computer already works. The free trial has no time limit and needs no card and no account, and until you enter a license key the license check sends nothing at all.