When you drag the contract PDF under a meeting note, one of two different things happens, and the interface shows you the same thing either way. Either the file is copied into the workspace, or a pointer is left to where it already sits on your disk. On the day, the difference changes nothing. Six months later, when you swap laptops or have to restore from a backup, it changes everything.
Embedded versus linked
With an embedded attachment, a copy of the file is written into the app’s own store. Delete the original from your desktop and the attachment under the note still opens, because two separate copies now exist and one of them is part of the workspace.
With a link, only a path is written, which means that moving the file to another folder breaks it and changing devices means it never worked there in the first place. You get space back. You pay in fragility.
There is a crude test that works well enough: if you saw a progress bar while the attachment was added, the file was copied. If it appeared instantly, a path was probably all that got stored.
What the backup covers
A nightly snapshot covers the workspace store, which puts embedded attachments inside the backup and leaves linked files outside it, and that single distinction decides how much of the sentence “I have a backup” is actually true. Most people find out during a restore.
The second distinction is finer. A backup sitting on the same disk as the workspace helps with a page deleted by mistake and helps with nothing at all against a stolen laptop or a dead drive. A copy on the same disk counts as version history, and it does not count as your only backup.
Export runs the hardest test
Export to Markdown and open the folder that comes out. What you see there is the most honest summary of what the app really keeps.
Embedded attachments come out into a subfolder and get linked from the markdown with relative paths. Linked files do not come out. In their place sits an absolute path pointing at some location on your own disk, and the odds of that path still being correct in six months are poor.
Run this test today, because the result is cheap to fix: turning a few important files from linked into embedded is a drag and drop.
The quota side of it
In a workspace running in the browser, attachments eat from the same quota as notes, and that quota is a percentage of the disk rather than a fixed allowance, so embedding hundred-megabyte scan files burns through it faster than three years of written archive ever would. The files decide, not the words.
The practical rule is short. Documents that need reading get embedded. Raw video, disk images and scan archives do not; those stay in cloud storage and only a link goes into the note.
A five-minute check
Three steps, once.
Export once and open the folder. See with your own eyes that the attachments came out. Then look at the date and the size of the last snapshot on the backup screen, and if that size is far smaller than you expected, take it as a sign that attachments are falling outside the snapshot. Then copy the exported folder onto another disk.
All three are one-time jobs. After that you stop asking whether your attachment is in the backup.