Vaultumi

What to do if you lose your iPhone with private photos on it

By Vaultumi. Published .

Losing a phone is stressful, and private photos make it worse. The order of the steps matters, so here is a calm sequence: secure the phone, understand what protects the vault, then get your photos back.

The first hour: secure the phone

These steps come from how iOS works in general, so follow Apple’s own instructions if yours differ for your version.

  1. Use Find My. On another device, or on iCloud.com, sign in with your Apple ID and look for the phone. If Find My was switched on beforehand, you can see where it is.
  2. Mark it as lost. This locks the phone and lets you show a message with a way to reach you. If someone honest finds it, that may be all you need.
  3. Call your carrier. They can suspend the SIM so nobody runs up charges or receives your verification texts.
  4. Change your Apple ID password if you think the phone could be in the wrong hands.
  5. Erase it if recovery looks unlikely. A remote erase removes everything on the phone, and the phone can no longer be tracked once it is erased.

Vaultumi has no server, so it cannot lock or erase your vault remotely. Find My is the tool for that.

What stands between a finder and your vault

A locked iPhone already needs your passcode or face. Past that, the vault has its own protection:

  • Every photo and video is encrypted on the device, each under its own random key.
  • The vault asks for your PIN or Face ID. After 5 wrong PINs, waits start at 30 seconds and grow to an hour for each further attempt. Restarting the phone starts the current wait again in full, and changing the date or time does not shorten it.
  • Part of the PIN protection is a secret that lives only in this iPhone’s Keychain and is in no backup, so a copy of the vault files cannot be used to test PIN guesses without that phone.
  • The app locks when you leave it.

Be realistic. A 6-digit PIN has only a million possibilities, so it is a convenience lock, not a strong secret. The limiter slows someone using the app, and the recovery code and a strong backup passphrase are the strong secrets. Someone who has watched you type your PIN, or who has a jailbroken phone, is a different matter. The PIN and Face ID section has the numbers.

If the phone was erased

An erase removes the Vaultumi app and its vault from that phone. Whether you get your photos back depends on what you prepared before:

You haveResult
A .vaultumibackup file and its passphraseYou can restore everything on any iPhone.
An iPhone backup (iCloud or computer) and your recovery codeThe encrypted files come back; open them with the recovery code.
An iPhone backup but no recovery codeThe files are there but cannot be opened.
NeitherThe vault is gone.

Restoring from a backup file

  1. Install Vaultumi on the new phone and create a new vault with a new PIN. Write down the new recovery code.
  2. Go to Settings > Backup > Restore, pick the file and type its passphrase.
  3. Vaultumi checks the whole file first. If anything is wrong, nothing is restored.

Restoring adds items and never deletes or replaces what you already have. If it is interrupted, restore the same file again and it carries on. Restoring is never limited by the free plan.

Restoring from an iPhone backup

If you set up the new phone from an iCloud or computer backup, the encrypted vault files come across but the device-bound key does not, so your PIN will not open the vault. This is expected. Choose Forgot PIN, enter your recovery code and set a new PIN. Turn Face ID on again afterwards.

If you used a decoy vault, it cannot be recovered this way, because the decoy has no recovery code. Create it again.

Once you are back in

  • If you worry that someone saw your recovery code, create a new one in Settings > Privacy & Security. The old one stops working.
  • Make a fresh backup file and run the Backup safety check on it.
  • Delete any copies of the vault you no longer need, and keep the new recovery code on paper.

The long version of all of this is in the backup and recovery guide.

What support can and cannot do

If you get stuck, email [email protected]. Please never send your PIN, recovery code, backup passphrase or photos. We do not need them and cannot use them. We also cannot unlock, reset or recover a vault for you, because nobody can without your secrets. We hold no copy of them, which is the point of the design.

Prepare now, while nothing is wrong

The best time for all of this is before you need it. Turn on Find My, write the recovery code on paper, and make a backup you have tested. How to back up a private photo vault takes about ten minutes, and it is the difference between an annoying day and losing the photos for good.

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