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.

Off
No passphrase set. Saved secrets are sealed by the OS keychain, as they always were.
Unlocked
A passphrase exists and the key is in memory. Everything works.
Locked
The key is not in memory. No saved secret is readable, by anyone, until you unlock.

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.

The lock showing On with an idle-lock selector, above the recovery kit's Restorable status line.
The lock (On, idle 15 min) sits directly above the recovery kit.shot-tour · Security & privacy pane: the lock reading On with idle 'After 15 minutes' and a Lock now button, above the recovery kit showing a green Restorable status line

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.

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.