Vaultaire, an encrypted photo vault for phones and tablets, has made client-side encrypted cloud backup and restore available to every user rather than only to paying subscribers. The change closes a gap that has followed privacy-first storage since it began: the harder a vault is to break into, the more completely its contents vanish when the device does. Vaultaire requires no account, no email address and no phone number to use.
Most people who want to keep images out of sight rely on a built-in hidden album or a locker app that puts a PIN screen in front of files that stay readable on disk. Neither approach encrypts the pictures themselves, which is why recovery tools can still pull them from device storage. Vaultaire takes the other road. Every file, thumbnail, index and key wrapper is encrypted before it is written, under a key derived from a shape the user draws on a grid rather than a password. Nothing about that shape leaves the device.
“Encrypted backup was the one thing standing between a private vault and the fear of losing everything to a broken phone,” said Rasty Turek, founder of Vaultaire. “Charging for it was the wrong trade, so we made it standard for everyone.”
The backup path derives a separate key from the same pattern and encrypts padded records before they reach the user’s own private cloud database, so the provider receives ciphertext and an encrypted recovery manifest rather than readable files or a usable key. Transfers cut short by a dropped connection now resume instead of starting over. Vaultaire holds an average user rating of 4.67, publishes its full security architecture, and maintains guidance in more than 30 languages.
The company is unusually plain about what the design does not cover, noting that anyone with access to the app container can count one encrypted index file per vault even though the contents stay unreadable. Vaultaire says the work ahead follows the same rule it applied to backup: reduce what any party, including the company itself, is able to see.
About Vaultaire
Vaultaire is an encrypted photo vault for phones and tablets, built by an independent software company founded in 2026. It encrypts photos, videos and documents on the device under a key derived from a pattern the user draws, requires no account, and operates no server able to read vault contents.