What the card is designed to hold, what is ready on it today, and what is still on its way.
Documents work today. You can add them, see the list, and open them again from the browser. What you need is a microSD card in the Vault, formatted as FAT32 — without one the Vault will say so plainly rather than fail quietly.
Two things in this chapter are still ahead rather than here: reaching documents from the device's own screen, and the guardian arrangement described in Chapter 08. Those are marked where they appear.
The card is designed to hold scans and PDFs — insurance policies, ID copies, property papers, medical records, school certificates, warranty bills — each one individually encrypted, up to 512MB per document. A card taken out of the device and put in a laptop will read as noise, by design. How much fits in total depends on the model you bought — see Storage in Chapter 01. If you have the Passwords model with no card, this chapter will not apply to you until you add one.
The device prepares any card you insert with folders ready — Identity, Property, Financial, Medical, Insurance, Education — and a plain-language note explaining what the card belongs to. You can check this yourself: put the card in a computer and you will see the folders and the note, even though there is nowhere yet to put a file into them from the device.
The plan is a plug-in-and-drag experience: connect the device, choose Documents, pick your files and a folder, and watch a progress bar while each one is sealed and written to the card. None of that exists yet. We will update this chapter with real steps once it does, rather than describe them in advance.
This is the intended division once document storage is available — worth reading now so you know what to scan and set aside.
| Keep here | Keep in a bank locker |
|---|---|
| Scans and photographs of documents | Original property deeds and registry papers |
| Policy numbers, account details, contacts | Original share certificates and bonds |
| A note of where each original is kept | The physical will |
| Medical history, prescriptions, reports | Anything with legal force in its paper form |
A scan of a property deed is enormously useful in an emergency — it has the numbers, the dates and the registry details. It is not the deed. Keep originals where you always kept them, and use this, once it exists, to record what exists and where it lives. That index is often more valuable than the documents themselves.
The plan is that documents open in your browser only while you are connected and unlocked, decrypted for as long as you are looking and never written to your disk as a permanent copy. That page does not exist yet, so there is nothing to view today.
Memory cards are the least reliable part of any device. Yours is encrypted, which protects it from strangers, but nothing protects it from simply failing one day. Documents are the one thing that cannot be reconstructed from memory. Chapter 07 covers backups generally.
A card swap loses the documents on it, today. The Vault can make a backup, but restoring one is not built yet — there is nothing that reads a backup back onto a fresh card. So a card is swappable in the sense that the Vault will accept a new one and set it up; it is not swappable in the sense that your files follow you across. Until restore ships, treat the card in your Vault as the only copy of what is on it, and keep any card you retire.
BendFlex® Vault · Owner's Manual v2.1 · last updated 27 August 2026