Vault Backup

Exporting vault shares, backing up or importing vaults shares.

What is a Backup in Vultisig

Vultisig implements a novel backup and recovery mechanism that differs from traditional seed phrase-based approaches. This mechanism also utilizes Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) technology to generate so called "Vault Shares", that enable more secure and reliable wallet recovery without seed phrases. These shares store all the data necessary to participate in Keygen/Keysign sessions and restore the Vault upon import. The parameters stored in Vault shares are to the device on which they are generated, making Vault shares unique and not interchangeable.

Backup in Settings

Vault shares should always be backed up.

How do Vault-Shares work in Vultisig?

• Each device in the vault has its own unique vault share. So each device needs its own backup.

• Each vault share by itself does not have access to any assets, so it is safe to export and store them digitally.

Never store different vault shares of the same vault in the same location, as this could potentially lead to loss of funds. This can happen if a malicious party gains access to that location and is able to reconstruct the vault.

Digital Storage Suggestions

• Storing vault-shares on different cloud drives/locations

• Having independent cloud drives or password manager for each Vault share.

• Ensuring that a device does not have access to multiple cloud drives or password managers that store Vault shares.

• Use offline devices to store vault shares

How to Backup Vault shares?

Click on the above image to watch an explanation video on Twitter

In the app, navigate to Settings and proceed to Vault Settings. Select Backup, enter an optional backup encryption password and proceed with Save. If not needed, save the vault share by pressing Skip directly.

Backup Encryption

It is possible to encrypt the Vault share with an optional password, adding an extra layer of security to the shares.

The Password option can either activated with putting in a strong password and saving it or can be skipped.

Recovering a lost device

If a device is lost, there are two ways to recover the device:

• Option 1: Import the original backed-up vault share into a new device. Vault shares can be imported into any device that support Vultisig. E.g. a vault share created from an iOS device, can be imported into iOS, MacOS, Android, etc.

• Option 2: Reshare the vault using the two other devices to include a new device. This is only possible on a 2-of-3 setup.

Backups are reshare sensitive. This means that backups are incompatible with each other after using the reshare feature, see here for more information.