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Your Recovery Key

The recovery key is the one thing that turns a backup's pictures back into your accounts. This page is about looking after it.

What it looks like

Thirty capital letters and digits in six groups of five, such as 7GHJK-M2N3P-Q4RTV-WXY5B-CD6FG-8HJ9K. The app leaves out characters that look alike (no zero or letter O, no one, I or L) and no vowels, so it never spells a word and you can't misread it. The last character is a check: if you mistype one character when you restore, the app says That key has a typo rather than telling you the key is wrong.

What makes it safe

The key is made fresh, at random, for each backup, and it has 136 bits of randomness. That's a number so large that no computer, now or in the foreseeable future, could try every possibility. The backup format also makes each guess deliberately slow and memory-hungry, so even a future quantum computer would face an impossible amount of work. A backup is, in short, as safe as the key.

The flip side: nobody can recover a lost key. Not you, not Pebble IT, not Apple. The app doesn't keep it. A backup whose key is gone is just a picture.

Where to keep it

  • A password manager is the best place: it's encrypted, it syncs to your other devices, and you'll find it when you need it.
  • Paper works well too, in a drawer or safe at home.
  • Not as a screenshot, and not in the same place as the images. Photos with the images and the key side by side is exactly what a thief would hope for.
  • Not in an email or message to yourself. Anything you share the key to keeps a readable copy.

One key per backup

Each backup has its own key. If you make a new backup, the new key doesn't unlock the old images, and the old key doesn't unlock the new ones. Note which key belongs to which backup, for example by the date in the image filenames, or simply keep only your latest backup and its key.

Typing it back in

When you restore, the app is forgiving: capital or small letters, spaces, dashes and line breaks don't matter. Paste it or type it. If the key is right but for a different backup, the app says That key doesn't match this backup.

Continue to Restoring a Backup.