Backup & recovery
The recovery kit, the vault passphrase, and what losing it costs.
What it's for
This pane holds two things, and they are two halves of one promise. The lock seals your saved logins and cards on this machine behind a passphrase the machine does not store. The recovery kit is the way back — because once the lock exists, a forgotten passphrase genuinely means gone, and "we can't read your data" honestly means "we can't recover it for you either."
Come here before a drop to lock the machine down, and once to make a kit and prove it restores.
Lock Umbra with a passphrase
Off by default. Turned on, it seals your saved logins, cards and connection passwords behind a passphrase; left off, those stay sealed by the OS keychain the way any browser stores them.
While it's locked, saving an Account's 2FA code, card or logins is refused with a message that Umbra is locked. The Account is never saved without them, and nothing already sealed is replaced. Unlock, then save again.
Turning it on requires ticking a box that says, in those words, that a forgotten passphrase loses every saved login and card. That is a gate, not a footnote — there is no reset, no recovery email, and no support route.
When it locks itself
The lock can close itself after a chosen idle period — 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes, or never. Fifteen is the default: long enough not to interrupt a working session, short enough that a laptop left on a desk is not indefinitely open.
What the lock does not touch: cookies and open Sessions are stored the way any browser stores them. The lock protects what you have saved — logins, cards, connection passwords — not your live browsing state.
Make a recovery kit — and prove it restores
The kit is one encrypted file plus a written phrase. The file holds everything; the phrase is the only thing that opens it.
Make the kit
Umbra writes the encrypted file and shows you the recovery phrase once. Write it down — it is not stored anywhere you can look up later, on purpose: a phrase you can look up never gets written down, and the one time you need it is the time the app is not there to show it to you.Keep the file and the phrase apart
The file on a different drive from this machine, the phrase on paper somewhere else. A backup that dies with the laptop it was protecting has protected nothing.Check it, now and again later
Point Umbra at the kit and press Check. It reads the file, opens it with your phrase, and counts what is inside — and changes nothing on this machine.Copies kept before an update
Separately from the kit, Umbra keeps a copy of its data file whenever an update is about to change how that file is laid out. The copy goes into a backups folder inside Umbra's data folder, and the newest three are kept. If there's no room for one, Umbra still opens and updates without it. The copies are ordinary application data, like the live file, with cards and logins still sealed inside; nothing in Umbra reads them, so you can delete the folder any time. Setting or removing the lock passphrase deletes them, so no copy stays sealed the old way. Security & privacy → What's here, what leaves shows where the data folder is.
If your data was last saved by a newer Umbra than the one opening it, Umbra says so and changes nothing. See Support.
For where your data actually sits and what leaves the machine, see What we can see. For keeping Accounts on a second machine of yours, see Sync between devices.