PP Vault Picture Password Vault

Support

PP Vault is a small project, not a company with a help desk. What that means in practice is on this page: a real person reads the mail and answers it, usually within a few days, and there is one kind of problem that no amount of goodwill can fix.

Before you write: the thing nobody can undo

There is no password reset. No recovery email, no security question, no support account that can open your vault. The app has no server and no copy of anything you put in it, so there is nothing here to reset it from.

What brings a vault back is your backup file, your seventeen words and your picture password, all three, and they do different jobs: the words open the file, and your picture password opens the vaults inside it. If you have all three, the answer is in Restore. If you do not, then whatever was in that vault is gone, and we would rather tell you that in a sentence on a web page than in a reply three days later.

Ten wrong password attempts erase the vault on that device. That is the feature, not a fault, and it is what makes a stolen phone a dead end. A backup and the words are what let you start again on the next one.

Getting in touch

Write to contact at ppvault dot app and say which of the three you are using, iPhone, Android or the browser extension, along with the version from the Settings screen and what you did before it went wrong.

Never send your password, your picture, your seventeen words or a backup file. Nobody here will ever ask for any of them, and anybody who does is not us. Every question worth answering can be answered without them.

The questions that come up most

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.

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.

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.

Reporting a security problem

Same address, and it goes to the top of the pile. Please include what you did and what you saw rather than only a conclusion, and please give us a chance to fix it before publishing. There is no bounty programme and it would be dishonest to imply one; what there is, is somebody who will read it properly and credit you if you want the credit.

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