Saving Designs

How Kanvas persists your work, what the save indicator is telling you, and how to save a copy.
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While you are signed in, Kanvas saves for you. There is no save button you must remember to press before closing the tab: every change you make to a design - adding a component, moving it, editing its configuration, drawing a relationship, renaming the design - is persisted to your account as you make it.

That leaves two things worth knowing: how to tell whether a change has actually landed, and how to deliberately create a second, separate copy.

The cloud icon beside the design name reports the state of the design against your account.

IndicatorMeaning
Cloud with a tick, plus a brief “Saved”Every change is persisted. Hovering shows how long ago the last save completed.
Cloud with an arrow, plus “Saving…”A change is in flight.
Struck-through cloud, plus “Unable to save. Retrying…”A save failed. Kanvas retries on its own; the message clears once one succeeds.

If the indicator sits on “Unable to save” for more than a moment, stop making changes until it clears - your recent edits exist only in the browser until a save succeeds. The usual causes are a lost connection to Layer5 Cloud or an expired session.

Clicking the indicator forces a save immediately rather than waiting for the next automatic one.

Hovering the save indicator on a saved design offers View Save History, which opens the design’s version history. Because saving is continuous, history rather than manual save points is how you get back to an earlier state of a design.

Save as… in the file menu creates a new design from what is currently on the canvas. You give the copy a name, Kanvas stores it as a separate design owned by you, and the canvas switches to that new design - so any further edits go to the copy, not to the original.

Use it to:

  • take a private working copy of a design someone shared with you,
  • branch a design before making a change you may not keep,
  • turn a design opened from the catalog into one of your own.

Save as… is disabled while the canvas is empty.

Saving requires an account. If you are working in Kanvas without signing in - in the playground, for example - the design lives in your browser only. Exporting the design is how you keep it.

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Last modified August 28, 2026: docs(kanvas): address review feedback on Operator and Designer pages (789c74a8f15)