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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 have the same features, drawn in Android's own style, and 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
Price history and settings	Yes
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.

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 are the exception. They do not come back on their own: the keys that open them were on the old phone and nowhere else. Ask each group's admin to invite you again, and do the same code ceremony you did the first time. It takes a couple of minutes per group.

That is a deliberate cost, and it buys something specific: because those keys were never in the backup, someone who steals the file — and guesses the passphrase — still cannot read anything shared with you.

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 left your phone. If you have a backup file, reinstall and restore it. If you do not, the inventory is gone.

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.

Two 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. And it needs the backup passphrase; the PIN itself cannot be recovered, guessed, or reset by us.

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, 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

Ask the admin to invite you again. It is the same code ceremony as the first time, and it takes about two minutes. Your new device generates fresh keys and pulls the current contents.

What you had already seen is not lost while you wait: shared items your phone had pulled are part of your own inventory and come back with your own restore. It is future updates that need the re-invite.

I ran a shared inventory and lost my phone

Everyone else keeps what they have — their copies are on their own phones, and nothing about your lost phone reaches into them. What you cannot currently do is prove to the group that a new phone is still you, so the practical path is to set up the shared Abditum again from your restored inventory and invite everyone back.

This is the roughest edge in the product, and we would rather say so than dress it up. A proper hand-over ceremony for exactly this case is being designed.

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.