What if I lose my recovery passphrase?

If your box is still alive, you can reset the phrase without the old one. Lose both the box and the phrase, and no one — including us — can recover your data.

Most of the time, this is recoverable. As long as your box is still running, you can reset your recovery passphrase without needing the old one — it’s a repeatable action, not a one-time secret you get exactly one chance at.

The real risk is losing both at once: your recovery passphrase and the home machine it would have restored. In that specific case, no one can bring your data back — not you, and not us. That’s the honest edge of the same promise that keeps your backups unreadable to us in the first place: “we can’t read it” and “we can rescue it without you” can’t both be true — we chose the one that protects you.

To keep that edge case rare, we give you a printable recovery kit to generate and store yourself when you set up backups, and a periodic nudge to confirm you still have it.

Write it down somewhere safe

Your recovery passphrase is never sent to us, so we have no copy to fall back on. Treat it like a house key, not a password you can reset by email.