What happens to your files
Some PDFOak tools upload your file and some never can. The answer depends on the tool, so this page lists them one by one.
15 tools never upload your file
These tools read, change and save your document in your browser. No PDFOak server receives it, so there is nothing to retain, log or delete. To check, open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the Network tab and run a tool. Cloudflare Web Analytics may send a small same-origin performance measurement to /cdn-cgi/rum, but no request carries your document.
- Compress PDF
- JPG to PDF
- PNG to PDF
- Rotate PDF
- Delete Pages
- Extract Pages
- Reorder Pages
- Watermark PDF
- Add Page Numbers
- Merge PDF
- Split PDF
- PDF to JPG
- PDF to PNG
- Lock PDF
- Unlock PDF
7 tools upload your file
These conversions need software that cannot run in a browser, so your file is sent to a PDFOak conversion server. Each tool page says so, and none of them shows a file picker until its retention statement has loaded. Before the upload starts, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that the request comes from a person. It runs in a frame from challenges.cloudflare.com, sees signals about your browser, and never receives your document. Browser tools do not load it.
- Word to PDF
- Excel to PDF
- PowerPoint to PDF
- OCR PDF
- PDF to Word
- PDF to Excel
- PDF to PowerPoint
How long the file is kept: until the request finishes. The upload goes into a temporary workspace, is converted, and the workspace is deleted when the request ends, whether the conversion succeeds or fails.
How deletion works: Deletion sits in a finally block around the conversion, so it runs on success, on failure and on an unexpected error. The file is never written to a database, object store or queue. If the server process is killed mid-request, a cleanup at the next start removes the stale workspace. PDF to Word goes through a second conversion service that follows the same pattern. It writes the finished Word file to its own temporary folder and removes it as soon as the response has been sent.
What is logged: the tool that ran and whether it worked. The conversion server does not log filenames, file sizes or file contents. Like most web servers, it may also record ordinary request lines such as time, endpoint and status. Rate limiting keeps a counter per client address in memory only.
Third parties: PDFOak does not send your file to a third-party conversion service. The converters are open-source programs running on PDFOak’s own servers. Uploads do travel through Cloudflare, which hosts this site, on their way to the conversion server.
Backups: none of this data is backed up. The temporary workspace is the only place your file exists on the conversion server, and it is removed when the request ends.
The retention statement on each tool page is read from the conversion server itself, so this page and the tools cannot drift apart.
What this page does not claim
- It does not say your files are never stored. The 7 conversion tools above do store your file temporarily, which is why this page counts them separately.
- It does not ask you to trust PDFOak for the browser tools. Those tools are private because they never send your document anywhere. The site’s Content-Security-Policy also limits the page to connections back to pdfoak.com, which stops a browser tool from posting to another site. It does not block requests to pdfoak.com itself, which is why the Network tab check is worth doing.
- It makes no claims about other PDF services.
Analytics
Cloudflare Web Analytics measures page performance and page views without cookies, localStorage, or a per-user identifier. It sends a small measurement to our own /cdn-cgi/rum endpoint. It does not measure or transmit your document, filename, password, size, or contents. Local tools still process your document on your device and do not upload it.