Backup & sync

A backup the server can’t read

Jotry works completely on its own, and Backup & sync is optional. Turn it on and Jotry keeps an encrypted copy of your notes on the sync server. If something happens to your phone, your notes are safe. When you’re ready, add your other devices and they share the same notes.

Your notes are encrypted on your phone before they leave it. The keys stay on your devices, so the server stores only what it can’t read. That covers the text of your notes, their titles, your notebooks and even the names of your devices.

Before you turn it on, Jotry explains it in three short pages:

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1. Jotry asks you to confirm you understand before it shows your 24 words.

Still no account

There’s no email address and no password to forget. Instead:

• Your devices hold the keys. A new device joins by showing a QR code, and a device that already syncs scans it and hands over the keys, sealed so only the new device can open them.
• Your 24-word recovery key brings your notes back on a new phone if you lose all your devices. Write it down or keep it in a password manager. Because there’s no account, there’s also no password reset: without your devices or those words, nobody can get your synced notes back, not even Jotry.
• Optional keychain backup. You can let your phone’s own encrypted backup keep this device’s key, so a restored phone rejoins without the recovery key.

Sync that respects your edits

• Automatic. Jotry syncs when you open it, a few seconds after you stop typing, and in the background about every half hour.
• Merged by paragraph. If you edit different paragraphs of the same note on two devices at once, both edits are kept. Only edits to the very same paragraph make a separate copy, so nothing is ever silently thrown away.
• History comes along. A note’s whole version history syncs with it.
• You decide. If a note was deleted on one device and edited on another, Jotry asks which you want to keep.

Your devices, under your control

The devices list shows every device in your group and roughly when each one last synced. Rename them, and remove a lost phone: removing a device changes the keys, so it can’t read anything written afterwards.