Support · Recovery
Recover your access.
Your Secret Phrase will be the only door back in. With it, restoring will take three steps. Without it, there is no side entrance — for you, for us, for anyone.
01 / THE PATH BACK — THREE STEPS
Three steps back in, once QERYX arrives.
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Set up QERYX on the device
Restoring will start on the new or wiped phone, with QERYX set up again.
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Choose Restore
On first launch, you will choose Restore instead of creating a new identity, and point it at your encrypted backup.
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Enter your Account ID and Secret Phrase
The backup will decrypt on-device. Your Secret Phrase is stretched with Argon2id for the local backup (m=256 MiB, t=4, p=2) before it touches a key — it never leaves your phone, and it is never sent to us.
02 / THE LIMITS
Read the limits before you need them.
We cannot recover your messages or your account if you lose your device and your Secret Phrase. There is no key-escrow and no master reset.
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Cannot
Decrypt your backup without the Secret Phrase. Neither can we — the key is derived from your Secret Phrase on your device, and we never see either.
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Cannot
Rebuild your history from the server. Delivered messages are erased rows; there is nothing on the relay to restore from.
03 / THE EDGE CASES
Ask the three that go wrong.
I forgot my Secret Phrase. What now?
The backup stays sealed — that is the design working, even when it hurts. The way back will be a fresh identity: your contacts will verify your new keys, and the new Secret Phrase belongs somewhere you cannot lose it.
In QERYX, both values will sit behind the biometric gate at Profile → Recovery Credentials, which will show your Account ID and Secret Phrase together. Write them down off-device, somewhere private, when you set QERYX up; that screen is the last place they can be recovered from rather than regenerated.
Why can't you make an exception for me?
Because an exception path is a compulsion path. Any door we could open for you, we could be forced to open for someone else. The absence of that door is the point.
Do my contacts see anything when I restore?
Restoring onto the same identity will keep your keys; conversations continue. If you create a new identity instead, your contacts will see a key change in the transparency log and should verify your keys again.