If you forget your master password, your recovery phrase is the way back in. This article covers using it, and what happens if you have lost both.
If you’ve lost both, the data is gone
If you have lost both your password and your recovery phrase, the vault cannot be opened, by anyone, ever. There is no backdoor, no reset email, and no support request that recovers it. Myne never holds a copy of your keys, which is exactly the property that keeps your notes private. This is the one unrecoverable situation; everything else on this page is recoverable. The rest of the safety section assumes you still have at least one of the two.
Unlocking with your recovery phrase
On the Unlock screen, below the password box, is a link: Forgot your password? Unlock with recovery phrase. Choose it and:
- Pick the vault, if you have more than one. (You can jump to it by account number, but that is optional.)
- Enter your 24 recovery words. Each word is checked as you go, so a mistyped or misremembered word is caught immediately.
- Set a new password. This step is required: unlocking with the phrase always ends by giving the vault a fresh password, so you have a password again next time.
That’s it. You’re back in, with a new password and the same recovery phrase as before.
If you have turned it on, the Unlock screen also offers a faster way back after the vault auto-locks: a short PIN, or macOS Touch ID, instead of the full password. It is opt-in from Settings → Privacy and does not replace the password — your master password is still required after the app restarts. See Quick unlock with a PIN or Touch ID for what it does and does not cover. Quick unlock is a convenience, not a recovery path: if you have forgotten the password, use the recovery phrase as above.
What actually happens to your keys
It helps to know what that new-password step does and doesn’t do. Your vault is protected by a single random key that lives inside it. Two independent wraps of that key exist: one locked by your password, one locked by your recovery phrase. Unlocking with the phrase opens the phrase’s wrap; setting a new password rewrites only the password’s wrap. The vault’s internal key never changes, your notes are not re-encrypted, and your recovery phrase keeps working unchanged. The phrase is not your password and does not derive it. It’s a second, independent key to the same vault.
On a new computer
The recovery phrase unlocks a vault, but it does not conjure one out of nothing. On a fresh machine with no vault yet, the phrase alone restores nothing: there is no server to pull your notes from. You first need the vault’s files on that machine, which you get by restoring a backup (see Restore from a backup); then the phrase, or your password, unlocks them.
Starting over
If both are truly lost, the only path forward is to start fresh. The Unlock screen has a last-resort link, Lost both password and recovery phrase? Delete vault and start over, which lets you delete the unopenable vault (you type DELETE to confirm) and create a new one. It recovers nothing; it only clears the way for a new vault.
Limits
The recovery phrase recovers a forgotten password; it does not recover lost vault files. Keep the phrase and a recent backup in separate, safe places. Together they cover both ways you could lose access.