Case Logbook docs

Your backup password

In short. Your backup password is the key to everything scrambled on your phone: patient names, MRNs, ages, sexes, earnings, photos, marks, and album and Teaching-file notes. We cannot reset it for you. If you forget it there are three ways back before anything is lost, and they are listed in order under If you forget it.

On this page

What it protects

Your backup password unlocks everything the app scrambles on your phone before storing it:

  • patient names, MRNs, ages and sexes;
  • your earnings figures;
  • your photos and X-rays, and the marks you draw on them;
  • album titles and notes, and the region and note on Teaching-file photos.

Lose the password and every way back below, and those scrambled values stay scrambled forever. No one can recover them for you. The full picture is in Where your data lives.

What it does not protect

  • The clinical content of your cases. Procedure, date, hospital, side and notes are stored in readable form. Losing your password does not lose them.
  • Your account. Your email and account stay. You can still sign in. You just can’t read what is scrambled.

How to pick one

  • Make it memorable to you and unguessable to anyone else. Something distinctive that you’ll still remember in a year.
  • Write it down somewhere safe. A piece of paper in a locked drawer, a password manager like 1Password or Bitwarden, your iPhone’s Keychain. We cannot recover this for you — that’s the point.
  • Don’t reuse a password from email or banking. Different purpose, different threat.

Daily use: biometric unlock

After setting your backup password during onboarding, you’ll be asked to enrol Face ID or fingerprint unlock. On a new phone, the app asks again as soon as your restore completes. Do it. Daily unlocking becomes instant — look at your phone, the vault unlocks. It’s also your safety net: on a device where biometric still works, you can set a new backup password if you ever forget yours (see If you forget it).

You’ll still need the backup password:

  • When you sign in on a new device for the first time
  • When biometric fails (the camera can’t see you, your finger is wet, you changed phones)

Biometric does not replace the password. It just stops you typing it constantly. If you ever cancel the Face/Touch ID prompt, the app simply shows you the backup-password field instead — no error, no fuss. And turning biometric back off in Settings → Security removes the key cleanly.

On a phone or browser that can’t offer quick unlock at all, the app just tells you plainly and keeps you on the backup password — nothing breaks and you’re never locked out. Your backup password is always enough to get in on its own.

If the vault has locked itself after a spell of inactivity, opening any screen brings up the unlock prompt, not an error. Unlock and the screen loads.

On a shared computer, the lock screen also says whose account is signed in (“Signed in as Dr …”) and offers Sign in as a different user — so if a colleague left their account signed in, you’ll see it’s not yours instead of wondering why your password isn’t working.

Set up a recovery phrase

A recovery phrase is your safety net for the day you forget your backup password on a device where Face ID or fingerprint also isn’t available — a borrowed laptop, a new phone you haven’t set up biometrics on yet. It’s 12 plain words, generated once, that can unlock your vault and let you set a fresh backup password.

Set one up under Settings → Security → Set up a recovery phrase. You’ll see the 12 words once. Save them somewhere safe — the easiest reliable way is to send them to yourself on WhatsApp, exactly like you’d keep a chat backup; a password manager or a photo in a private album works just as well. Then tap I’ve saved my recovery phrase to finish.

A few things worth knowing:

  • It’s independent of your backup password. Changing your password never breaks your recovery phrase, and vice versa. You can hold both.
  • You can set one up at any time — you don’t have to be a new user. If you’ve been using the app for a while, just open Settings and add one.
  • You can regenerate it whenever you like. The moment you do, the old 12 words stop working — so update wherever you saved them.
  • We never see it. The phrase is shown on your screen and is never sent to or stored on our servers, which is also why only you can use it.

Skip the typing on a new device. When you’re recovering on a new device, you don’t have to hand-type the 12 words. On the phone that already has the phrase (unlocked behind Face ID / fingerprint), open Settings → Security and choose Show as a pairing code — it displays the phrase as a QR. On the new device, tap Scan instead of typing at the recovery-phrase field and point its camera at the code; the 12 words fill in for you. A photo of the code is useless on its own: recovery works only once you are signed into your own account through the magic link to your email. No camera? Type the 12 words.

If you’d rather not, you don’t have to — the app will occasionally offer, and you can dismiss it. But it’s the one thing that turns “no password, no biometric” from a data-losing reset into a two-minute recovery, so it’s worth the two minutes it takes.

If you forget it

Try these in order. Only the last rung loses anything.

  1. Fingerprint or face on any device. Open that device, go to Settings → Security → Change backup password and tap Forgot your backup password?. Confirm with your fingerprint or face, type a new password, and you are done. No old password is needed. If the app is locked, the Can’t unlock? link on the lock screen offers the same thing. Nothing is lost, and your other devices use the new password next time they ask.
  2. An unlocked device where you remember the old password. On that device go to Settings → Security and change your backup password the normal way. The app re-scrambles your existing key under the new password. Nothing is lost.
  3. Your recovery phrase. On the lock screen tap Can’t unlock?, then Use a recovery phrase, and type or scan your 12 words. The vault unlocks straight away and everything comes back as it was. Then the app offers to enable fingerprint or face on that device, or, on a device without them, asks you to set a new backup password for it. If you take the fingerprint or face offer, your backup password is left untouched and keeps working alongside the phrase. On a new phone with no lock screen, if you set up a recovery phrase, tap Use your recovery phrase instead on the Restore name vault screen.
  4. Reset. Only if you have none of the above. On the lock screen tap Can’t unlock?, then Start a reset (last resort), and type RESET to confirm. This wipes the secret key on the servers and on this device and sends you back through setup with a fresh key. Only this rung loses anything, and it loses everything the old key scrambled: patient names, MRNs, ages and sexes, your earnings figures, your photos and X-rays with their marks, album titles and notes, and Teaching-file regions and notes all become unreadable bytes. Every case and its clinical content (procedure, date, hospital, side, notes) stays.

Lost in reset

After a reset, each case whose name cannot be read shows a Lost in reset label. Tap it to type the name again (it is scrambled under your new key) or to delete the case. If your phone still had a readable copy, the app repairs most of these on its own, so you only see the label where both copies are gone.

Why we can’t reset it for you

There is no email us and we’ll reset it option, and there never will be. If we could reset your password from our side, so could anyone who broke into our systems. Signal, ProtonMail and WhatsApp’s encrypted backups make the same trade: stronger security in exchange for a password we can never touch.

That is also why the Forgot your backup password? route lives on your device, behind your fingerprint or face. Your device already holds the key, your face or finger proves it is you, and our servers are never asked.