Forgot your vault PIN or got a new phone? How ZeroBox recovery works
Short answer. If you forget your PIN, only the 25-character recovery key you wrote down earlier can open the vault on that phone. To move to a new phone, you save the whole vault as one encrypted file, carry it over on a drive or a card, and open it there with your PIN or your recovery key. ZeroBox keeps no copy and has no account, so nobody can restore a vault for you.
If you forget your PIN
ZeroBox can create a recovery key: 25 characters, shown once. You write it on paper and keep it away from the phone. On the PIN screen you choose to enter the recovery key, and then you set a new PIN to replace the one you forgot. The recovery key stays the same.
Two limits worth knowing before you need them:
- Creating a new recovery key replaces the older one, and the app shows it only once.
- The recovery key opens the vault on this phone. On its own it does not bring your photos to another device. For that you need the transfer file described below.
If you never created a recovery key and forget the PIN, the photos in the vault cannot be recovered. There is no server where a copy could be held, and the app warns about this. Create the key now, while you remember the PIN: in Settings choose Create recovery key.
Moving to a new phone
- On the old phone open Settings, then Transfer to a new phone. ZeroBox saves everything (all albums, files and your keys) into one encrypted file. Your old vault stays as it is.
- Choose what protects the file: your recovery key (the app recommends this) or your PIN.
- Carry the file to the new phone on a drive or a card.
- Install ZeroBox on the new phone and choose “Transfer a vault” on the first screen. The new phone must not have a vault yet: the file becomes its vault. If the file is protected by a recovery key, the new phone needs ZeroBox 0.6.2 or newer.
- Enter the PIN or recovery key you chose. If you used the recovery key, you then set a PIN for the new phone.
- A file on a drive can be copied. Once the new phone has the vault, delete the file from the drive.
If the phone breaks or is lost
The vault lives only on your phone. Without a transfer file saved earlier, a broken or lost phone means a lost vault. Saving a transfer file now and then is the whole safety net, and it is yours: no cloud, no account.
Why it works this way
ZeroBox has no internet permission, no account and no cloud. That is why it cannot leak your files online, and also why it cannot rescue them for you. The two things that bring a vault back are both in your hands: the recovery key on paper and the transfer file.