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 |
| 64 GB | 64 GB | ~13,000 pages | A household that scans everything |
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. Do not swap a card that already holds documents. Restoring a backup onto a new card is not built yet, so the documents on the old card do not move across — and the Vault cannot put them back. If you outgrow a card, keep the old one safe until restore ships; see Chapter 07.
Right now, if you forget it, your vault is gone for good. There is no "forgot password," and the recovery words you write down in step 6 do not open anything yet — that ability arrives in a future update, and until then your passphrase is the only door there is. Choose one you genuinely will not forget, or let the device generate one for you and keep it somewhere safe until it is memorised.
Password1!, and the device will suggest six random ones for you if you would rather not invent your own.Setup writes something to the device right now that ties itself to these exact twelve words — sealed alongside your passphrase, at the same moment, and not something we can add to your vault later. That is the half of recovery that has to happen today or not at all. Making the words open your vault is the half we can still ship in an update; making a vault built without that seal recoverable is not. So a vault set up today, with the words written down, will be recoverable once the update lands. A vault set up today with the card left blank will not — no update can fix that retroactively. We would rather annoy you for two minutes now than be the company that could have made your vault recoverable and didn't ask.
They do not open your vault today, but treat them as if they already did — anyone who will be able to use them once the update lands can also lose or expose them today. 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.
The plan is to let you split your recovery across three people, so that any two of them together can restore the vault and no single one can — surviving one lost card and one unavailable person. That is not built yet. Chapter 06 has the detail on what exists today and what is still ahead.
BendFlex® Vault · Owner's Manual v2.1 · last updated 27 August 2026