What is a recovery key?

🔄 One key, two roles

The vocabulary is what confuses people, so here it is plainly. There is one key, a file or a string of text, that unlocks your notes. What it is called depends on when you reach for it:

• Encryption key: the everyday name, when you use it to open your notes on a new device.
• Recovery key: the same key, on the day you have forgotten your password and need your locked notes back.

We say recovery key to make one point: keep a copy somewhere else. It is the glass you break in an emergency.

🆘 How getting back in actually works

Because of the zero knowledge design, we cannot reset anything on your behalf. The sequence goes like this:

1. You forget the password. You can reset it by email and sign in again, but the notes look like nonsense, because a new password does not open old locks.
2. You fetch your copy of the encryption key from wherever you put it.
3. You load it back in. TaskNote recognises the key at once, unlocks the notes and carries on.

If no copy of that key exists outside the app, recovery is not difficult. It is mathematically impossible.

📝 Where to keep it

This key is the only lifeline, so a copy has to live outside the app.

• A USB stick. Keep the file on a drive in a drawer.
• Cloud storage. Google Drive or Dropbox will do, ideally inside an archive with its own password.
• On paper. If your key is a string of text, print it and file it with your documents.

The one rule: never keep the only copy inside TaskNote. Locked out of TaskNote means locked out of the key as well.

⚠️ If both are gone

Honesty here is worth more than comfort.

Lose the password and the key together, and:

• The account still opens, after a password reset.
• The notes do not. They are gone for good.
• They stay on our servers as encrypted blocks until you delete them.

Which is the proof, unpleasant as it is, that nobody but you ever had access.

❓ Questions people ask