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User guide

Recovery

Find what happened to you. Each answer starts with what it costs — including the two that cost everything.

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There are no screenshots on this page — the steps are short and the situations are not. The iPhone and Android apps behave the same way in everything on this page, drawn in Android's own style, so every answer below applies to both.

Because we hold nothing, we can restore nothing. That is the trade this app makes, and this page is the honest accounting of it: no account to reset, no support ticket that gets your data back, no back door we could open even for you. What stands between you and a very bad day is a file you made and a passphrase you remember.

So read the situations below before you are in one. They are short, and they are the whole argument for spending five minutes on a backup today.

Before anything goes wrong

Four things, once:

1. Make a backup. More ▸ Backup ▸ Create backup. Free, and the only thing on this list that cannot be done afterwards.
2. Write the passphrase down and keep it somewhere that would survive losing the phone — not in the phone, and not in the same place as the backup file.
3. Turn on backup reminders. Free, local to your phone, and the reason your backup will not be two years old when you need it.
4. If someone would need this without you, make an Estate Export. It is a different file for a different day.

Everything below is easier or harder depending only on whether you did these.

What comes back, and what does not

A restore is not a login. It replaces this device's inventory with the contents of a file you made — so the honest question is what that file holds:

	In the backup
Holdings, Abdita, tags	Yes
Photos	Yes, the ones stored on that device
Settings	Yes
Price history	Not in the file — it comes back from our server on its own
Your app-lock PIN	No — on purpose; restoring is how a forgotten PIN gets cleared
Shared-inventory keys	No — on purpose; a stolen backup file must not open your shared groups
Your subscription	Not in the file — it lives with your App Store or Google Play account

Both of those exclusions are deliberate, and both are why the answers below say what they say.

Price history is the one row that looks like a loss and is not. Spot prices are public market data that our server hands out on request, so a restored phone draws its charts from the server the first time it fetches prices — about a month of history on the free tier, up to a year on Pro. Carrying it in the backup would swell every file with data anyone can ask us for. An Estate Export is the different case and does carry a price snapshot, because it has to open on a day when neither this app nor this company is around to ask.

I have a new phone

Install the app, open Backup, and restore your file. Your personal inventory comes back whole. There is nothing to sign into, because there is no account — the file and its passphrase are the entire recovery.

Shared inventories do not carry on by themselves. Their contents come back, because they were part of your inventory when the backup was made, but the keys that opened them lived on the old phone and are not in the file. The app tells you which sharings this affects, and the way back is the same for each: the person who set it up adds you again, with the same six-digit ceremony you did the first time. About two minutes per sharing, done together in person.

Nothing is lost in the meantime. Your copy stays exactly as it was, and theirs does too; it is only new changes that wait until you are added again. Until then, the app shows the sharing as needing a fresh invite rather than letting you edit a copy nobody else would see.

If the old phone is lost rather than replaced, ask that same person to remove your old device from the sharing as well. Removing it re-keys the container, so a phone in someone else's hands stops being able to read anything new.

Why the keys are not in the backup: a stolen backup file, and a guessed passphrase, would otherwise be enough to become you in every sharing you are in. Keeping those keys on the device, and only on the device, is what makes the file safe to store anywhere.

I deleted the app

The encrypted database went with it. There is no server copy to ask for, because there never was one — your inventory has never been on our server. If you have a backup file, reinstall and restore it. If you do not, the inventory is gone. Shared Abdita need a fresh invite after a reinstall, exactly as on a new phone: deleting the app takes the keys with it.

I forgot my app-lock PIN

Tap "Restore from backup" on the lock screen. Pick your backup file, enter its passphrase, and the restore clears the PIN along the way. Then close the app completely and open it again.

Three things to know before you do it. It replaces this device's inventory with the backup's contents — anything added since that backup was made is not in it. It needs that backup's passphrase; the PIN itself cannot be recovered, guessed, or reset by us. And it treats this phone as a new one: its sharing keys and identity are removed along with the PIN, so each sharing you belong to needs a fresh invite from its admin, exactly as it would on a new phone.

You may wonder why the lock screen offers a way past itself. It does not, really: anyone holding your backup file and its passphrase can already read your entire inventory on their own computer without touching your phone. The lock was never what stood between them and your data. And because the restore also removes this phone's sharing keys, it does not hand anyone your place in a sharing either — so the button gives away nothing, and blocks only you.

I forgot my backup passphrase

The file cannot be opened. Not by us, not by anyone. It is encrypted with a key derived from the passphrase itself; we never had it, never stored a copy, and built no way to recover one. Guessing is not practical — the derivation is deliberately slow and memory-hungry for exactly that reason.

If you can still open the app on some device, do one thing now, before anything else: make a fresh backup with a passphrase you record as you type it. The old file stops mattering the moment a readable one exists.

I lost access to a shared inventory

If you moved to a new phone, or deleted and reinstalled the app, the sharing needs a fresh invite — the keys that opened it were on the old install and nowhere else. The person who set it up adds you again with the same six-digit ceremony; the items you already had come back with your own restore, and new changes start arriving again once you are added.

If the sharing was made private, or you were removed from it, there is nothing to recover: that was a decision by the person who ran it, and asking them is the only route. What your phone had already pulled stays on your phone.

If nothing changed on your side and the sharing has simply stopped updating, the app says why at the top of that Abditum — start there. Often the cause is at the other end: the person making the changes can't send them while their own subscription is inactive. A re-key by the admin finishes on its own the next time both phones are online.

I ran a shared inventory and lost my phone

Restore your backup on the new phone. Everything in the sharing comes back as your own inventory, but your standing as its admin does not: the key that made you the admin was on the lost phone and is not in the backup, deliberately, for the reason above.

If you had appointed another admin, they add you back with the six-digit ceremony and can promote you again. Everyone else notices nothing.

If you were the only admin, nobody can add anyone to that sharing any more, including you. The people in it keep what they have. Start a new sharing from the new phone and invite them into it, which is the same two minutes per person as the first time; each of them can then remove the old Abditum from their own device.

Before that, remove the sharing's old copy of you if you can: if the old phone is in someone else's hands it still holds the keys, and a new sharing with a new key is what puts your data out of its reach. Anything the lost phone had already downloaded is already on it, and no re-key can take that back.

Someone needs to open this without me

That is what Estate Export is for — an encrypted PDF anyone can open with a passphrase and a PDF reader, with no assumption that this app, this phone, or this company still exists. A backup file is not a substitute: it needs Abditex Bullion to open it.

My subscription disappeared

Use Restore purchases in More ▸ Subscription. Your subscription lives with your App Store or Google Play account, not in the app and not in your backup, so a new phone or a reinstall does not spend it.

And whatever the state of your subscription: restoring a backup is never gated. A lapsed subscription costs you Pro features, never access to your own data. We would not build the other thing.