PP Vault Picture Password Vault

Questions

The ones that come up most, answered properly rather than in a sentence. If yours is not here, write to us: a real person reads the mail. Before you do, the one thing worth knowing is that there is no password reset and nobody can make one, which the support page says in full.

I have a new phone

Install the app, and on the first screen choose Restore rather than starting a new vault. Three things get you back, and it is worth knowing which one does what. The backup file, wherever you saved it. The seventeen words, which open the file. And your picture password, which opens the vaults inside it, because a backup holds them sealed exactly as they were and nothing in the app can re-seal them on your behalf.

Your photograph travels inside the file, so you do not need to still have the original picture or even the phone it was taken on. Your two characters and your two spots are not in the file in any form anybody can read, which is the whole point of it, so those are the part you have to remember.

The two halves fail differently, and neither has a way round. Without the words, the file does not open. Without your picture password, the file opens and the vaults inside it do not.

A Wi-Fi Hide folder or vault has not come back after a restore

Give the app permission to see your location, and it comes straight back. Nothing is lost and nothing has to be set up again.

The app asks at the end of a restore, so on a current version you will have been offered this already. If you tapped past it, or restored on an older version, the rest of this answer is how to get back to it.

The reason it comes up at all is that a network name counts as location on both phones, so neither will tell an app which Wi-Fi it is on until you have allowed that. A fresh install has allowed nothing yet, and tying something to a network is what normally prompts the question, which on a restored phone already happened, on the phone before. So the rule arrives intact and the app cannot see where it is, and a rule it cannot satisfy keeps the folder out of the list or the vault shut, which is the same answer it would give in the wrong cafe.

That note is shown after every restore, whether or not anything in the backup uses Wi-Fi Hide, and that is deliberate. A note that appeared only when there was a hidden folder would be a way of announcing that one exists, to anybody standing over you, and not announcing it is the entire feature.

For a folder: open the vault, then Settings, Wi-Fi Hide, and allow it when asked. For a whole vault, the vault will not open at all, so there is no Settings to reach: allow it in the system instead, under Settings, Apps, PP Vault, Permissions, Location, and choose the precise option rather than the approximate one. Only the precise one yields a network name. Then open the app on the right network and your vault is there.

Nothing about your position is read, stored or sent in any of this. The permission is the only door Android and iOS put a network name behind, and the name is all the app ever asks for.

Autofill is not offering anything

Two switches, and the second is the one people miss. Turn the app on in the system first: on iPhone in Settings, General, AutoFill and Passwords; on Android in Settings, Passwords and accounts. Then designate a vault inside PP Vault, under Settings, Autofill. Until a vault is designated the sheet is empty by design, because nothing is offered from a vault you have not chosen to offer from.

Your picture password is asked for every single time something is filled. The device passcode, your fingerprint and your face do not open the vault and cannot be offered instead.

The extension offered to fill, then stopped after I reloaded the page

Click the PP Vault button in the toolbar again and the offer comes back. The extension is given permission to touch a page only for as long as you are on it, and a reload counts as leaving: the browser takes the permission away and the extension has to be invited back. It is inconvenient by design, and the alternative is an extension with standing permission to read every page you open.

I paid for Pro and this device still shows advertisements

Settings, then Restore purchases. The purchase belongs to the store account that made it, so it follows that account onto any device signed in to it. There is no PP Vault account for it to be attached to.

A locked folder is not showing up in search

That is what locking it does. A locked folder keeps its contents out of search, out of Favourites and away from the autofill sheet until you open it, and it shuts again when you leave it.

How large a file can I put in

Four gigabytes each, and as many of them as the device has room for. There is no limit on the vault as a whole: what it holds is bounded by the storage on your phone, which the phone reports in its own words when it runs out.

Nothing is shrunk, re-encoded or sent anywhere to be made smaller. A file goes in exactly as it is and comes back out exactly as it went in, which is the only useful thing a vault can promise about a document somebody may need to produce.

Where is my backup kept

Wherever you put it. A backup is one encrypted file, written to the place you chose when you wrote it, and nothing sends it anywhere or keeps a second copy. If you put it in a cloud folder, it is in that cloud folder, encrypted, and the seventeen words are still what opens it.

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