Your Recovery Stays Yours

When you're doing the work of recovery, what you write down is some of the most honest and vulnerable material of your life. Inventories. Resentments. Close calls. The things you wouldn't say out loud a year ago.

That's why, from the beginning, every tool on this site has kept your entries in your own browser. No account. No sign-up. Nothing sent anywhere.

That's still true. But it came with a real cost: if you cleared your browser, switched phones, or got a new laptop, your work stayed behind. We heard from people who wanted a way to keep it safe without handing it to anyone.

So we built two optional ways to do that. Both were designed around one rule: we should never be able to read what you write.

Save Your Data

You'll find a new Save Your Data page in the top navigation. It offers two choices, and you can use either, both, or neither.

Sync across devices

If you want your entries on more than one phone or computer, you can create a private vault. There's no email address, no username, and no password. Instead, your browser makes a long key, and that key is the only way into your vault.

Here's what that means in practice:

• Your entries are encrypted on your device before they leave it. What reaches our server is scrambled data that we can't open.
• The key is created in your browser and we never see it.
• Because we don't have it, we can't reset it. If you lose your key, no one can recover your synced entries, including us. The page walks you through saving it safely, and you can download a plain key file, copy it, or show a QR code.
• That downloaded file is named and written so it doesn't say what it belongs to.
• If you think someone has seen your key, you can change it any time. The old one stops working.
• You can delete your vault entirely with one button. It removes everything from our server.
• By default, sync locks after 20 minutes without activity, or when you close the tab. You can choose to stay signed in on a device that's yours alone.

Your entries still live on your device first. Sync just keeps an encrypted copy so it's there when you need it.

An encrypted backup file

Prefer to keep everything in your own hands? You can save your entries to a file that's encrypted with a passphrase only you know, and restore it on any device. Nothing is uploaded at all. The file is created and opened entirely in your browser.

What's underneath

You shouldn't need to understand any of this to use it, but here's what we did, because trust should be earned in the open.

• We don't collect who you are. Sync needs no email and no name. There's nothing to link a vault to a person.
• We can't peek at your entries, even by accident. The server only ever holds encrypted data. It doesn't know which tool a piece of data belongs to, and it can't see what's inside.
• The site can only talk to itself. A strict security policy means the pages can't load code or send data to anyone else, even if something went wrong. We use no ads, no trackers, and no third-party scripts.
• Other sites don't learn where you came from. When you follow a link out, we don't tell the next site which page you were on.
• Analytics stay cookieless. We can see roughly how many people visit which pages. We can't see who you are.

What we can't promise

We'd rather be honest than reassuring.

• Anyone using your device can see what's on it. Sync and backups protect your entries in transit and in storage elsewhere. They can't hide what's already saved in your browser from someone sitting at your computer or phone. If that's a concern, use a private profile or clear your data when you're done.
• Our server sees a visitor's IP address, like any website does. We use it only for short-lived limits that stop people from guessing keys, and we store it scrambled, not as an address.
• A lost key is a lost vault. That's the price of a system we can't get into. It's also the point.

Try it, or don't

Everything works as it always did without an account. If you'd like to save your work, you'll find both options under Save Your Data. If you have questions, or you notice something that doesn't feel right, we want to hear about it at support@sidewaysandupsidedown.com.

Recovery is hard enough. Your privacy shouldn't be one more thing you have to worry about.