Backups and exports
One sentence governs this page, and it is the one people most often assume is not true:
wrote it
On any tier. There is no device-migration path in this product.
If you are looking for a way to move your vault to a new phone, there isn't one. Reading the rest of this page is worth doing anyway, because the reason is the same reason your passwords are safe.
Why files do not travel
A file has a wrapper — the encryption over the whole file — and contents, the entries inside it. Both can be tied to a device, and which one does the tying depends on your tier.
The wrapper. On Gold, Platinum and Titanium, files are written with two layers of encryption. The outer layer is derived from your passcode. The inner one uses a key held in that phone's StrongBox or TEE. Decryption unwraps the device layer first, so without that phone's secure hardware the file cannot even be opened.
The contents. On every tier except Gold, the entries inside the file stay encrypted with your DEK — which needs Shard 1, which never leaves the device.
| Tier | Wrapper | Entries | Opens elsewhere? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🥈 Silver | Portable | Encrypted with the DEK | ❌ contents are unreadable |
| 🥇 Gold | Device-bound | Decrypted | ❌ wrapper cannot be opened |
| 💎 Platinum | Device-bound | Encrypted with the DEK | ❌ both |
| 🛡️ Titanium | Device-bound | Encrypted with the DEK | ❌ both |
Every tier is blocked. Only the reason differs — which is exactly why partial readings of this keep producing confident, wrong conclusions.
What backups are actually for
They protect you against losing data on the phone you still have:
- an entry deleted by accident
- an import that went wrong
- a vault reset you did not mean to do
They do not protect you against losing the phone. Nothing in this product does, and nothing could without also giving us the ability to read your vault.
Backups go to your Google Drive
If you enable backup, files are written to your own Google Drive account, not to us. We never receive them and could not read them if we did.
Specifically, a backup goes to a private area of your Drive that only this app can open — it is not listed among your files, so you cannot rename it by accident or share it by mistake. An export is different: there you choose between the phone's storage, your visible My Drive, or that same private area.
The app asks Google for two narrow permissions — its own private folder, and files it created itself. Neither lets it see the rest of your Drive.
What to do instead of relying on migration
Since a new phone starts an empty vault, plan for that up front:
- Keep your passcode somewhere you will still have it in a year. Losing the phone and the passcode together is unrecoverable; losing only the phone still means starting fresh.
- Do not make PasswordEpic the only copy of something you cannot lose. For a handful of genuinely critical credentials — the recovery codes for your email, say — keep a second copy somewhere else.
- Back up regularly anyway. It is still the answer for every failure that is not "the phone is gone".
We would rather say this plainly than let you discover it after losing a device.
Read next
- How it works — why Shard 1 cannot leave the phone
- One device per account — moving to a new phone, and what support can do
- Security tiers — which tier writes which kind of file