If you lose your phone

Your messages live on your phone (or on your computer, if that is what you use). We do not keep them on our server: the moment a message reaches you, the server deletes it. We do not keep your account password either.

This is deliberate: what we do not have cannot be lost, handed over or stolen from us. It has a flip side, though: if the phone is lost, breaks, or loses its memory, both your conversations and your way into the account go with it.

There are two separate safeguards against those two troubles. Neither replaces the other — it is best to have both.

The recovery phrase brings back your way into the account

Twenty-four English words, shown by the app once. Copy them onto paper.

Lost the phone? Take a new one, enter your Master ID and those words, and you are back in your account, with your contacts and your sessions. The app will ask you to pick a new password along the way, so there is no old one to remember.

Worth knowing:

• The phrase can only be written out ahead of time. After the phone is gone there is nothing left to write it from.
• You set it up on your main device — the one where you created the account. Find it under “My profile” → “Recovery phrase”.
• We do not know those words and will never ask you for them. If someone asks you to send them, it is not us.
• Whoever holds your piece of paper can get into your account. Keep it like the key to your home — and not on the phone itself: a photo or a note there disappears with the phone, and a thief gets it.
• Write your Master ID down next to it: the words are no help without it.
• If you unlink one of the devices you had linked before, the recovery phrase you wrote down stops working. That is deliberate: unlinking changes the shared key of your devices, so that the unlinked one can no longer read your data, and the phrase holds the key as it was on the day you wrote it. The app will tell you — write out a new recovery phrase; the old paper is no longer needed.

The recovery phrase does not bring back your conversations.

The archive brings back your conversations

The archive is a single file holding your conversations, locked with a password you choose yourself. Make it under “My profile” → “Conversation archive”.

• Inside: messages, your sessions, contact cards and your contacts’ names.
• Not inside: your password and account keys — a file that ends up in the wrong hands must not double as a way into your account.
• Photos, voice messages and video are not included yet.
• A file kept on that same phone disappears along with it. Copy it somewhere else: a computer, a memory stick, cloud storage.
• Right after you make it, the app offers to check the archive — do not skip that. A file nobody ever opened is not an archive, it is a hope.
• We cannot recover the archive password: forget the password and the file will not open.

The archive does not bring back your way into the account.

No phrase, and the phone is already gone

Everything hinges on one question: do you remember your Master ID and password?

You remember the password — the account can be saved

Then it is not the account that is lost, only the keys: they lived on the phone that is gone. The app will keep saying “this device is not linked”, and there is nothing to link it with — linking is done by the main device, which no longer exists.

There is a way out of that dead end: “Settings” → “Troubleshooting” → “The main device is lost”. The app will make new keys for the account in place of the lost ones.

You will see the price on screen before you tap, and it is a real one:

• all previous devices are unlinked;
• messages that had not reached you yet are lost — there is nothing left to decrypt them with;
• your contacts will see a different safety number (see Safety number: making sure it is really them) — which looks exactly like an impersonation. You will have to compare numbers with them again, and it is better to warn them in advance;
• the conversations already stored on this device stay where they are.

Right after that, write down a new recovery phrase and destroy the old paper: it holds the old keys, does not fit the new ones, and can no longer bring the account back. The app says so itself — the line reads “The old phrase no longer works”.

The password is gone too — there is nothing to bring back

Then we cannot help — not because we do not want to, but because we hold nothing of yours. We never asked for a phone number or an email, so there is nothing to prove the account is yours either.

What is left is starting a new account and exchanging invitations with your contacts again. That is why the twenty-four words get written down on day one, not on the day of the accident.