Set up your household, pair devices, share with family, connect sync, and understand how your data is kept safe.
When you first open MyLifePapers, pick Start New. That creates a new household. Think of it as your private, encrypted household. You'll be the first member. Give the household a name (like "The Garcia Family"), then continue to passphrase setup.
You can rename the household later from Settings → Household.
Your passphrase is the master key to your household. It unlocks the encryption on every device you use. MyLifePapers never sees it, never stores it, and cannot reset it.
If a family member sent you an invite, pick Join Household on the welcome screen. You'll paste or scan the invite code they shared, set your own passphrase for this device, and download the shared records.
Two kinds of invites exist:
From Settings → Household → Add member. You'll create the member, then they join from their own device with an invite you generate.
By default, records you create are private to you. To share one:
The person you shared with will see the record the next time their device syncs.
Trusted Access lets you share a read-only view of selected records with people who don't use MyLifePapers, like an attorney, a caregiver, or an accountant. They get a web link and an access code.
Trusted Access is a Plus-plan feature. Views stay live: if you update a shared record, the linked view updates automatically.
From Settings → Household, tap the member you want to remove, then confirm. They stop receiving any new or updated shared records after your next sync. A member who already synced a copy to their own device may still be able to open what they had, so removal ends future sharing rather than erasing past access.
The fastest way to connect a second device when both are nearby:
If the two devices aren't in the same place (for example, helping a parent set up), use two-code remote pairing:
There is no "log out" button. MyLifePapers is designed so that if a device physically has your records, it works. To truly disconnect a device you no longer use:
Google Drive sync is free: your encrypted file is stored in your own Google Drive. It stays in your Drive and never passes through MyLifePapers servers.
MyLifePapers folder we create, not your entire Drive.To share one household across family members with Google Drive, everyone signs in with the same Google account, so all devices read and write the same MyLifePapers folder. Dropbox and OneDrive connect the same way, each with its own Connect button in Sync settings. If you'd rather each person use their own account, use MyLifePapers Cloud (Plus): it handles family sharing with no folder to manage.
MyLifePapers Cloud is our managed sync service, included in the Plus plan. It's simpler (no sharing permissions to manage) and works for households who don't already have a sync provider.
If you already use iCloud Drive, or want to use a plain local folder, you can point MyLifePapers at it:
This option costs nothing extra and uses storage you already have. The trade-off: setting up additional members is manual (you share the folder with them yourself). For hands-off family sharing, use MyLifePapers Cloud.
Nothing breaks. MyLifePapers is local-first: every record is stored in an encrypted database on each device. Sync only copies changes. If your internet is out, you can keep reading, editing, and adding records. The next time you're online, your changes upload and any changes from other devices download.
Records are owned by whoever created them, so two people don't edit the same record at the same time. Each member syncs their own set of records, which is why offline changes never collide: when you reconnect, your changes upload and everyone else's download.
Yes. MyLifePapers uses end-to-end encryption with a key derived from your passphrase. In plain English: your data is scrambled on your device before it ever touches any sync service, and the key to unscramble it is only stored in your head (and the recovery code you wrote down).
Technical details:
We designed the system so that even if our servers were fully compromised, your data would remain unreadable.
A copy lives on every device you use MyLifePapers on. Another copy lives with whichever sync provider you picked (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, or MyLifePapers Cloud). Files are encrypted on disk in all locations. Even someone with full access to your Google Drive account cannot read your records without your passphrase.
Your data is backed up wherever you sync. Because MyLifePapers is local-first, a full copy lives on every device you have set up, and if you use a sync target (MyLifePapers Cloud, or your own Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or iCloud), an encrypted copy lives there too. Losing one device does not lose your data.
To move to a new device, install MyLifePapers, choose Join Household or Restore during setup, connect the same sync target, and enter your passphrase (or recovery code). Your encrypted records download and decrypt on the new device.
If you wrote down your recovery code during setup, use it to unlock. Recovery codes work on any device where you restore your records.
If you lost both the passphrase and the recovery code, there's no way to recover the data. We designed the system to make that impossible, meaning no one (including us) can read your data, ever. The trade-off is that we can't reset it for you.
The AI Chat in MyLifePapers runs entirely on your device. It uses two small AI models that we download to your device the first time you open Chat: one for turning your question into a vector (so we can find matching records), and optionally one for summarizing results.
No prompts or answers are ever sent to our servers or to any third-party AI provider. Everything is local. This is both a privacy decision and a reliability one: works offline, no rate limits.
For chat and semantic search to find your records, MyLifePapers builds a searchable index on-device.
Indexed:
Never indexed:
This means the chat will never surface a password when you ask it a question, even if you explicitly ask for one. Passwords have their own dedicated nav section with a separate search.
Ask the chat things like "is my family prepared for an emergency" or "would my accounts reach the right person." It runs a checklist of common household scenarios and shows what you already have on file and what's worth considering.
These checks are observations, not verdicts. Our keyword matching can't always find things tracked in non-standard ways, like a beneficiary written in a note instead of a structured field. The checklist tells you what we could find in your MyLifePapers records; if you keep some information elsewhere, you can ignore those items.
Bulk Upload lets you drop dozens of documents at once and have MyLifePapers classify and extract fields from each. It uses on-device OCR plus a keyword classifier (no AI model needed) to suggest a type, a label, and any extractable fields like dates or identifiers. You review and save each one.
Everything runs locally. Files you drop in are never uploaded anywhere. They become part of your records on the device you're using.