Are my backups encrypted?
Yes — encrypted inside your house before they leave, with a key only you hold. Our servers store ciphertext; we can hand it back, but we can't open it.
Yes. Home backups are encrypted inside your house before they ever leave it, with a key only you hold. Singer Intelligent Homes’ servers store ciphertext — we can hand a backup back to you, but we can’t open it ourselves.
That covers your home’s database and any files it holds — photos, documents, the whole record — plus the file list itself, since even file names can say something about how you live. What we can see, in plain text, is limited to what running the service actually needs: your home’s id, backup size, and timestamps.
Once you’re paired to Charyl Cloud, backups run automatically, once a night. Restoring onto the box you’re already using never needs your recovery passphrase — that phrase exists specifically for the harder case, moving your home onto a brand-new machine.
Two different passphrases
A daily passphrase is what the box uses during normal, day-to-day operation. A separate recovery passphrase is what you’d use to bring your home back on a new machine. Losing the second one has real consequences — covered in what if I lose my recovery passphrase?
Didn’t find it? Ask the community
The board opens with the first early-access cohort
Conversations move here once the board opens to the first invited homes — until then, reach us directly.