How to Recover Access to Your Vault When You Are Locked Out

There are two different problems that both feel like being locked out. If you have forgotten your account password — the one that signs you in — you can reset it by email, the same as anywhere else. That gets you back into the account, but not, on its own, into the encrypted vault.

If you have forgotten your vault passphrase, that is the harder one, because LifeWyn never had it and cannot reset it. Everything below is about that case: getting back the key to the contents, not just the door to the account.

When you set up a recovery phrase, LifeWyn seals a second copy of your vault key using that phrase, and stores the sealed copy the same way it stores the passphrase-sealed one. The phrase is generated for you; you write it down and keep it somewhere physical and safe, away from the device you log in on.

If you lose your passphrase, you start the recovery-phrase flow, prove you hold the phrase, and set a new passphrase. Because the phrase can unseal the key, it is as powerful as the passphrase itself — which is the point, and also the reason it must be stored as carefully as you would store a spare key to your house.

The second route does not rely on you remembering anything. In your Security Center you can arm a set of trusted contacts and split your recovery key into fragments shared among them. No single fragment is useful on its own; several of them, combined, restore access.

LifeWyn asks for at least three contacts, and a set number of them must approve together before their fragments are recombined. When you need recovery, you begin a request and your contacts are asked to approve; once enough have, your access is rebuilt. The design means no one contact — and no attacker who compromises just one of them — can get into your vault alone.

Pick for independence, not just closeness. Three people who share a household are the people most likely to be unavailable in the same event — the same accident, the same lost phone. Spread the set across different homes, ideally different cities, and favour whoever is organised and reachable over whoever is emotionally closest.

Name more than the minimum. If you register only the three that are required to approve, then losing any one of them locks the route — and people do become unreachable, permanently, which is the event this exists for. Adding a fourth or fifth contact means one loss no longer leaves you stuck. Tell each person in advance that you have named them and what it means: a recovery request that arrives unannounced looks exactly like a scam, and a sensible person's correct instinct is to ignore it.

There is no back door and no master override. Support cannot read your vault, cannot reset your passphrase, and cannot approve your recovery on your behalf. This is a deliberate limit, and it is the same limit that stops anyone else — including us — from getting in.

It also means recovery only works if you set it up. A vault with no recovery phrase and no trusted contacts, whose passphrase is then lost, cannot be opened by anyone. Arm at least one route early, and check it still reflects your life once a year.