Backups and recovery
With a Flowsta Vault on your device, Your Own AI backs up automatically: your encryption key, your conversations, your AIs, and your memories. The backups live in your Vault on your own machine - encrypted; we never receive them.
The Flowsta Vault
Everything local works without it, forever. The Flowsta Vault is a free app that holds your Flowsta identity on your own computer - the Vault itself has no password, keeps nothing of yours on our servers, and nobody can lock you out of it, not even us. Connect it and Your Own AI can:
- Back up your AI world automatically - conversations, memory, and your AIs - and bring it all back on a new device with one click.
- Sign your exports with your identity, so anyone can verify they really came from you (Export and receipts).
- Run online models the most private way there is - the Vault signs you in, and your name never travels with your messages (Online models).
What it takes: free, about two minutes. The Vault gives you 24 recovery words to keep on paper - the only way back in, which is exactly why no one can take it from you.
Get Flowsta Vault in Settings (under Your Flowsta Identity) or on the Online Models page opens the handoff page, which says to come back to Your Own AI. Both sides notice the moment the Vault is ready and sign you in. Online models are an optional plan on top - never a requirement for anything above.
What backs up
- Your recovery key - the key that encrypts your records, escrowed into your Vault so a lost laptop never means unreadable history.
- Every conversation - each one as its own compressed object, so backups grow only with what changed and no session is ever too large to protect.
- Your AIs - configurations, portraits, and authored knowledge.
- Your documents - which documents you added, their cards and tags, where each file was, and which AI may draw on each. Never the text itself, so a large collection can never be the reason a backup fails.
- Your Memory - the shared profile facts, and what your AIs are told about you.
When backups run
- After you chat - a minute after a turn is recorded.
- A few minutes after launch, when the Vault is open.
- Once a day while the app runs, if no backup has succeeded in the last twenty-four hours.
- Back up now - Settings, Backups. It says what it did.
A locked Vault is waited for, not given up on: the app checks every couple of minutes, for up to a day, and backs up when you unlock. A backup reads only what changed since the last one, so after the first pass a backup of many conversations takes minutes. The first backup after installing 0.7.1, or on a new machine, reads everything once; a large set of records can take a while, and the upload happens at the end, so keep the Vault unlocked through it. An AI whose records do not answer in time is set aside for that pass, with what it had in the previous backup kept, and the rest of your AIs back up on time.
Each backup also checks the Vault against what this device believes it stored there. If the Vault holds fewer conversations than the device uploaded, each one is checked and the missing ones are stored again on that pass.
The Vault's Your Data page shows what's stored, sized honestly, with per-conversation detail - and everything there is yours to export or delete.
Recovery on a new machine
- Install the Flowsta Vault first and restore your identity with your recovery words.
- When the Vault's dashboard asks, import your Vault export file - before opening your apps, so their backups are waiting for them. (Until you answer, apps can't overwrite anything the export holds.)
- Install Your Own AI and connect the Vault. If it says your Vault holds a different conversation key, Settings → Backups & recovery walks you through it as two labeled steps: restore the key (the app restarts), then restore the conversations.
Everything returns: conversations replay into your records, AIs come back with their portraits and knowledge, and memory rebuilds - and the restore reports exactly what came back. A restore adds only what this machine is missing: conversations already here stay single, anything you deleted on any of your computers stays deleted (each backup carries what its computer deleted), and right after a launch it waits for your records to be ready. Your documents come back as records, and the app reads each file back in from where it was last seen, asking only for files that moved (see Your documents). If a backup is ever held, Settings, Backups says so plainly, with what to do next.
The no-lock-in guarantee
Your Vault's Download Export hands you everything - readable, with the keys included. The Cryptographic Autonomy License guarantees you keep the keys to your own data: your data exports usable, and no technical or legal restriction stands between you and it. Even if we ceased operating, the app and your data keep working.
One honest caveat
Backups protect against a lost or broken machine only if the Vault's own data survives - keep your 24 recovery words safe, and see the Flowsta docs for the full recovery model.