Vodou's entire browsing profile is off-the-record — there is no separate "private browsing mode" to turn on, because ordinary browsing already works this way.

What stays in memory only

Cookies never touch disk (with one opt-in exception — see Cookie exceptions: staying signed in) and disappear the moment Vodou's process ends. The same is true of your visited-link history and the tracker-blocking counters.

What's kept on disk, and why

Early versions kept everything in RAM, including the browser's page cache — which used a lot of memory on machines with 16 GB or less. Vodou now keeps the HTTP cache and site storage (things like localStorage) in a folder on disk, capped at 512 MB, so revisited pages can be served from disk instead of RAM or the network.

Secure shredding

That disk folder is securely shredded on every clean exit: every file is overwritten with random bytes and then deleted, so a recovery tool finds noise rather than your browsing data. The same shred also runs at the next startup, in case a crash or a locked file skipped it on the way out.

Honest limit: on an SSD, wear-leveling means an overwrite isn't guaranteed to land on the exact same physical cells as the original data. Shredding is defence in depth on top of full-disk encryption (BitLocker / FileVault / LUKS), not a replacement for it.

Clearing everything immediately

You don't have to wait until you quit — Ctrl+Shift+Del clears the cache, cookies (including any saved for allowlisted sites), this session's tracker-blocking counts, visited-link history, and every tab's back/forward memory right away. See Clearing your browsing data.