# Data ownership
URL: https://openship.io/docs/architecture/data-ownership.md

Exactly what lives where — self-hosted database vs. Openship Cloud — and how projects move between them.

Openship is explicit about where each piece of data lives, because that's what makes both self-hosting and the cloud trustworthy.

## Self-hosted is sovereign

Local and server projects — and all of their deployments, domains, environment variables, and logs — live only in your instance's database. Nothing is sent to Openship Cloud for these projects. If you never connect a cloud account, your instance is fully standalone.

## Cloud projects live on the cloud

Cloud projects are canonical on Openship Cloud. Your instance holds no shadow copy; it reads and writes them through the gateway. See [Cloud-as-source](/docs/architecture/cloud-as-source).

## Moving a project

- **Promote** (local → cloud): the project's data is copied to the cloud, then the local rows are removed.
- **Bring home** (cloud → local): the reverse.

A project is always in exactly one place, so there is never a divergent copy to reconcile.