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Set up a recovery key before you need it

Save a recovery key, and do it while you still know your master password. You can keep the key yourself, or use social recovery to split it across people you trust so no single person holds it. Nobody at Zen can reset your master password, so this is the only thing standing between forgetting it and losing the vault.

Zen PasswordsChecked 2026-08-26

This is the article to act on rather than read. Everything else in this section can wait; this one cannot be done after the fact, because generating a recovery key requires being able to open the vault.

Keeping the key yourself

  1. Generate the key

    The app produces it and shows it to you once. It is written to be read back by a human: the characters people confuse, like the letter O and the digit zero, are left out of the alphabet it uses.

  2. Put it somewhere physical

    Printed and in a drawer, or written down and kept with your important documents. Storing it in the vault it unlocks is the one place it must not go, and storing it in a note on the same phone is nearly as bad.

  3. Tell one other person where it is

    Not what it says. Where it is. A recovery key nobody can find is the same as no recovery key.

The recovery screen in Zen Passwords, offering a recovery key and social recovery.
Two ways to do it. Either is better than neither.

Social recovery

Instead of one piece of paper, the key is split across several people you trust, and a number of them have to bring their parts together to reconstruct it. No single person can open your vault, including the one you trust most, and losing touch with one of them does not lock you out.

It suits people who are more worried about losing a piece of paper than about the people in their life, which is most people. It costs a conversation with each of them, which is the reason it gets put off.

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