The real one is a systemd unit on the server: the vault lands over Syncthing, the unit waits for it to settle, renders the site into a brand new directory and swaps a symlink. Anything anybody left in the old directory is simply not in the new one.

This is that, for the copy of the site in your browser. Everything you put over ~ — appended, replaced, renamed, removed, chmod’ed — is gone, and the notes are what Hugo rendered again. It needs write access to ~, so it is tilen’s to run; a guest has nothing to put back.

A reload is a build, for exactly the same reason. What you changed does survive opening a note and coming back, because that is not a reload.

/tmp is not part of the build and is not touched. What you made there is still there.