Storage

SuperDoc is a self-hosted solution where you decide how and when documents are stored. Existing storage solutions like S3 and Cloud Storage are secure and work well.

Storage approaches

How and when a document is stored often depends on the level of document collaboration needed.

Collaboration Level	Approach	Complexity	When Changes Are Stored
High	Yjs/CRDT	Medium	Continuously (backend)
Low	Check in/out	Low	User-triggered (frontend)

High collaboration

For real-time, multi-user collaboration (similar to Google Docs) using Yjs/CRDT, each client connects to a realtime collaboration service that merges all user updates.

Complexity: Medium — Requires a server-side Yjs/CRDT service

How it works:

• Every document edit (as a Yjs byte array) is automatically sent via WebSocket to the Yjs/CRDT service
• When all changes are merged, the service stores the new document
• Storage happens continuously on the backend

Low collaboration

For scenarios where only one user edits at a time (like SharePoint), implement a locking mechanism where users check out documents before editing.

Complexity: Low — Requires storing and querying document lock/unlock state

How it works:

• When the active user makes an edit, debounced changes are sent to your server which stores the document
• Alternatively, when a user saves/checks in the document, it is sent to your server for storage
• Storage is triggered by user actions on the frontend

What to store

In both low collaboration and high collaboration approaches, when the document arrives at your backend:

1. Create a unique version ID

   Generate a unique identifier for the document version:

   document_revision1764976265.docx
   
2. Store the document version

   Save the full DOCX binary to your cloud storage:

   s3://documents_bucket/versions/document_revision1764976265.docx
   
3. Save version metadata

   Store the document version ID and its storage path in your database for later retrieval.

When the document is requested later, look up the latest version in your database and serve it from cloud storage.

Export methods

The ways to export a document are covered in Import/Export.

Store the full DOCX binary for the highest fidelity version of the document.

Best practices

Unique Version IDs

Include timestamps or UUIDs to ensure uniqueness

Store Full DOCX

Preserves all formatting, comments, and tracked changes

Keep Version History

Store multiple versions for audit trails and recovery

Use Cloud Storage

S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage