About fifteen minutes. Do it somewhere you can write things down, and don't rush the last step.
| The device | A little larger than a pen drive, with a standard USB plug built in. No cable to lose. |
| Your memory card | Already inside and formatted, unless you bought the model without one. See Storage below. |
| Your recovery card | A blank card. You will write on it in step 6. Keep it forever. |
| The red card | One warning, printed large. Please actually read it. |
| Identity slip | Your serial number and device fingerprint. Check it matches the screen in step 2. |
The device comes in several sizes, and the card inside is removable, so you are never stuck with the one you chose.
| Model | Card | Roughly | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Passwords | No card | Passwords and notes only | Someone who wants a password and passkey device and nothing more |
| 4 GB | 4 GB | ~800 scanned pages | The essential papers |
| 8 GB | 8 GB | ~1,600 pages | A couple's documents |
| 16 GB | 16 GB | ~3,200 pages | A household, comfortably |
| 32 GB | 32 GB | ~6,500 pages | A household plus years of records |
Passwords, notes and every setting live in the device itself, not on the card, so the Passwords model does everything in this manual except store documents. You can add a card at any time and it will be set up for you. Moving to a larger card is a restore from your backup — see Chapter 07.
Xk9$mQ. The device will suggest one if you would rather.Every week somebody fills a vault with their whole life, forgets the passphrase, and finds the recovery card was never written. There is nothing anyone can do for them. We would rather annoy you for two minutes at the start than be the company that lost your property papers.
Anyone holding these words can open your vault, so where they live is a real decision. There is no single right answer, only trade-offs — pick deliberately rather than by default.
| Where | Good | The risk you are accepting |
|---|---|---|
| Written on the card, at home | Nothing digital to attack | Fire, flood, a house move, an enthusiastic clean-up |
| Bank locker or with a lawyer | Survives almost anything | Not available at 2am when you actually need it |
| Given to your spouse or a sibling | Reachable, and someone else knows the plan exists | You are trusting that person completely, including if things change |
| Emailed to yourself | You will still find it in ten years | Your email account now opens your vault. If it is ever breached, so is everything. |
It is a reasonable choice for many families, and far better than losing the words entirely — but understand what you are doing. Your email password now protects your entire vault, so that account needs two-factor authentication and a password you use nowhere else.
And keep it apart from your backups. If a backup file and the words that open it sit in the same inbox, the encryption stops meaning anything. Chapter 07 explains the separation.
Write your device serial — the VG- number on the screen and on your identity slip — next to the words. A future family member holding recovery words with no idea what they open is stuck. With the serial they can identify the device, look it up at vault.bendflex.in, and know what they are holding.
If your family already keeps important documents in printed form — a will, policy folders, a locker file — print the words, laminate them, and put them with those papers. It costs nothing and it puts your recovery where your family already knows to look.
Split your recovery across three people, so that any two of them together can open the vault and no single one can. It survives one lost card and one unavailable person. Chapter 06 sets this up — it takes about five minutes.
BendFlex · VaultPlug Guardian · Owner's Manual v1