Vault Recovery & Restoration Guide
Lost your phone, replaced your PC or forgot your password? Your vault is safe in your clouds. Here is how to get it back, step by step.
Only You Can Recover Your Vault
Sino keeps no copy of your keys and cannot reset your password. You can recover with your 24-word IronSeed, a passkey you registered, or, for beneficiaries, a legacy handover. If all of these are lost, nobody can open the vault, including us, so write your 24 words down and keep them somewhere safe and offline.
Restore with Your 24-Word IronSeed
Works on any new Android phone or Windows PC
Your recovery phrase opens the encrypted copy of your vault key that Sino keeps in your clouds. Use it when you get a new device, reinstall Sino, or forget your master password.
- Install Sino: Download Sino on your new Android phone or Windows 10/11 PC.
- Choose restore: On the welcome screen, tap Restore Vault (on Windows, Recover Existing Vault).
- Pick your phrase: Tap Use 24-Word IronSeed. (On Windows, you choose after connecting a cloud: the next screen offers both the phrase and the passkey.)
- Connect a cloud: Sign in to a cloud account that holds your vault (Google Drive, MEGA, S3 or Azure).
- Enter your words: Type your 24 words in order, one per box (you can also paste the whole phrase into the first box), then tap Verify & Restore (on Windows, Recover Vault).
- Set a new master password: Choose the password that will unlock Sino on this device. Turn on fingerprint, face or Windows Hello unlock if you like.
- Your library comes back: Sino rebuilds your library from your clouds. Files open straight from the cloud, and you can restore them to your device when you want.
"Like the combination to a safe-deposit box kept at your bank. Your clouds hold the box, with your vault's key inside; only your 24 words open it. Lose your phone, and the box is still there."
Lost or Stolen Device? Revoke It
Make the missing device wipe Sino from itself
- Open Devices: On any device where your vault is unlocked (or on a new one you just restored), open Settings, Devices.
- Revoke it: Choose the missing device and tap Revoke.
- It wipes itself: The next time that device connects, it erases its local vault, even if it is locked. A phone checks at every unlock, every hour (retrying when offline) and right after a wrong password; a PC checks every 15 minutes while Sino is running and right after a wrong password. Your cloud backups are not touched.
- Change your passwords: Revoking cannot take back files that device already decrypted, so also change your master password and your cloud account passwords.
Recover Without the Sino App
Offline recovery with the open-source Sino Open SDK
Your files never depend on our app. The free, open-source Sino Open SDK reads the published Sino format and recovers your vault on any computer with Java 17, using only a downloaded copy of your SinoVault folder and your 24 words.
From each cloud you used, download the SinoVault folder. One is enough if it holds everything; give several and the tool fills the gaps.
The tool asks for your phrase with the input hidden, makes no network connections and never overwrites existing files.
Each file is checked against the checksum recorded when it was encrypted; a damaged copy is replaced by another cloud's copy.
Only the real vault can be recovered this way: the decoy (PhantomVault) is tied to one device by design.