Your Recovery Phrase

Your recovery phrase is the most important thing you will ever store outside LivingWill. This article explains what it is, why it cannot be replaced by us, and exactly how to protect it.

What it is

When you set up your account, the app generates a recovery phrase of 24 words. These come from a standard word list (the BIP-39 list) arranged in a specific order. That sequence is unique to you and is shown to you once, at setup, for you to write down.

The recovery phrase is a backup key. It can restore access to your encrypted content if you ever lose or forget your passphrase. It is not a convenience feature. It is the lifeline.

Why we cannot reset it

We want to be completely direct, because this is the point people most often wish were different.

We cannot reset your recovery phrase, and without it we cannot recover your content. This is not a limitation we are working to remove. It is the foundation of the whole privacy promise. If we held a way to restore your access, then your private content would only be as safe as our ability to never be tricked, pressured, breached, or compelled into using it. By never holding that ability, we make a much stronger guarantee: your content is yours, structurally, not just by policy.

The trade is real and we will not soften it. The same wall that keeps everyone else out also means you must safeguard this phrase yourself.

How to protect it

Treat the recovery phrase like the master key to a vault, because that is what it is.

• Write it on paper, by hand. Do not keep it only in a notes app, email, screenshot, or cloud document.
• Store it somewhere safe from fire and water, such as a small home safe or a sealed envelope in a secure place.
• Make a second copy in a separate location, for example a bank deposit box or a trusted relative's safe, so a single accident does not destroy it.
• Never type it anywhere except LivingWill's official recovery screen. No legitimate support person will ever ask for it. Anyone who does is attacking you.

Splitting it for resilience

For families who want stronger protection against a single lost copy, LivingWill supports splitting the recovery phrase into multiple shares using a method where no single share reveals anything, and a defined number of shares together can reconstruct it. For example, shares can be distributed so that several trusted people each hold one, and a subset of them together can recover access. This protects against both loss (no single point of failure) and misuse (no single person holds the whole secret). It is optional and worth considering for important accounts.

What to tell your family

Your recovery phrase strategy should not die with you. Without leaking the phrase itself prematurely, make sure the right people know that a recovery phrase exists, that it is essential, and roughly how it is stored or split, so it can actually be used when it is needed. A perfectly protected phrase that no one can ever find is the same, in the end, as no phrase at all.

Read your encryption for why this phrase carries so much weight, and what we can and cannot see for the full boundary of our access.