Short guides for every part of MyLifePapers

Create a household

When you first open MyLifePapers, pick Start New. That creates a new household — think of it as your private vault. 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.

Set your passphrase

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.

1. Choose something you'll remember — long sentences work better than short passwords.
2. Type it twice to confirm.
3. Write down the recovery code you're shown next and store it somewhere safe (a password manager, a safe deposit box, your partner's device).

Restore from an invite code

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 vault.

Two kinds of invites exist:

• QR invite — scanned from the other device, good for side-by-side setup.
• Remote code — a 6-digit pairing code plus a 4-character secret key. The pairing code can be texted; the secret key should be shared verbally (phone call, in person). See Pair with a remote code.

Add a spouse or family member

From Settings → Household → Add member. You'll create the member, then they join from their own device with an invite you generate.

1. Open Settings and go to the Household section.
2. Tap Add member.
3. Enter their name.
4. Confirm by typing your own passphrase — this proves you're the account owner.
5. Share the invite code or QR with them.
6. They open MyLifePapers on their device → Join Household → paste the code → set their own passphrase.

Share a record with a family member

By default, records you create are private to you. To share one:

1. Open the record.
2. Tap Edit.
3. Scroll to the Sharing section.
4. Pick who you want to share it with. You can also choose which sections are shared (basic info, files, private details).
5. Save.

The person you shared with will see the record the next time their device syncs.

Share with someone outside your household (Trusted Access)

Trusted Access lets you share a read-only view of selected records with people who don't use MyLifePapers — an attorney, a caregiver, an accountant. They get a web link and an access code.

1. Open Trusted Access from the sidebar.
2. Tap New view.
3. Pick the records you want to include.
4. Set an access code (the person will need it to open the view).
5. Share the link and the code separately — ideally link by email and code by phone.

Trusted Access is a Plus-plan feature. Views stay live: if you update a shared record, the linked view updates automatically.

Remove a member

From Settings → Household, tap the member you want to remove, then confirm. Their access to shared records is revoked immediately; you'll need to sync once for the change to propagate to other devices.

Pair your phone with your desktop (QR code)

The fastest way to connect a second device when both are nearby:

1. On your first device (already set up), open Settings → Pair another device.
2. A QR code appears.
3. On your second device, install MyLifePapers and open it. Pick Join Household → Scan QR code.
4. Point the camera at the QR code on the first device.
5. On the new device, set a passphrase for this device (can be the same as the other or different).
6. The vault syncs over to the new device. Done.

Pair with a remote code (across distance)

If the two devices aren't in the same place — for example, helping a parent set up — use two-code remote pairing:

1. On your first device, go to Settings → Pair another device → Remote Code.
2. Two codes are shown: a 6-digit pairing code and a 4-character secret key.
3. Send the pairing code by text or email. Send the secret key verbally — phone call or in person.
4. On the second device, pick Join Household → Remote Code. Enter the 6-digit code first, then the secret key.
5. The vault syncs. The codes expire in 15 minutes.

Disconnect a device

There's no "log out" button — MyLifePapers is designed so that if a device physically has the vault, it works. To truly disconnect a device you no longer use:

• Uninstall the app from that device. The encrypted vault file is deleted with it.
• If you're worried someone else may have had access, change your passphrase on your primary device. Old vaults remain encrypted with the old passphrase and become unusable after you sync the new one.

Connect Google Drive for sync

Google Drive sync is free — your vault file is stored in your own Google Drive, not on our servers.

1. Open Settings → Sync & Backup.
2. Under Google Drive, tap Connect.
3. Sign in with your Google account and approve the permission request. We only request access to the single MyLifePapers folder we create — not your entire Drive.
4. Your vault uploads the first time and syncs after every change.

To share the same household across family members using Google Drive, the member who owns the folder needs to share the MyLifePapers folder with the other member's Google account from within the Sync settings.

Use MyLifePapers Cloud (Plus)

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.

1. Upgrade to Plus from the app or pricing section.
2. Go to Settings → Sync & Backup.
3. Pick MyLifePapers Cloud and sign in with your Plus license.
4. Your encrypted vault is stored on our infrastructure. We cannot read it — it's end-to-end encrypted with your passphrase. We only see opaque blobs.

Sync via iCloud Drive or Dropbox

If you already use iCloud Drive or Dropbox on both devices, you can point MyLifePapers to a folder in either:

1. Open Settings → Sync & Backup → Cloud Drive Sync.
2. Pick the folder you'd like to use (MyLifePapers suggests the default iCloud Drive path on macOS).
3. Sync handling is delegated to iCloud or Dropbox — that provider keeps the vault file in sync across your devices.

This option costs nothing extra and uses storage you already have. The trade-off: setting up additional members is manual (you invite them to the shared folder through iCloud or Dropbox directly).

What happens if sync is offline

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.

If two people edit the same record while offline, both edits are preserved. The most recent edit wins, and the other is kept in history so you can roll back if needed.

Is my data safe?

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:

• Passphrase → key: Argon2id (memory-hard, resistant to brute force).
• Data encryption: AES-256-GCM.
• Cross-member sharing: libsodium sealed boxes (public-key crypto).

We designed the system so that even if our servers were fully compromised, your data would remain unreadable.

What MyLifePapers never sees

• Your passphrase — never transmitted, never stored server-side.
• The contents of your records — only encrypted blobs.
• Your file attachments — encrypted before upload.
• Your passwords — the passwords feature is stored in the same vault, encrypted the same way. Chat and search in the app never read password contents.
• Your AI interactions — on-device chat and search run entirely locally. No prompt leaves your device.

Where is my data physically stored?

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 the vault without your passphrase.

Backup and export

You can export an encrypted .mlp backup file at any time from Settings → Sync & Backup → Export Backup. The exported file is still encrypted with your passphrase — you can store it in a safe deposit box, on a thumb drive, or anywhere else.

To restore from a backup on a new device: during onboarding, pick Restore from backup and open the .mlp file. You'll need your passphrase to decrypt it.

What if I forget my passphrase?

If you wrote down your recovery code during setup, use it to unlock. Recovery codes work on any device where you restore the vault.

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.

How the chat works

The AI Chat in MyLifePapers runs entirely on your device. It uses two small AI models — one for turning your question into a vector (so we can find matching records), and optionally one for summarizing results — that we download to your device the first time you open Chat.

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.

What's indexed, what's not

For chat and semantic search to find your records, MyLifePapers builds a searchable index on-device.

Indexed:

• Record labels (like "Aetna Health Insurance")
• Non-sensitive fields from the record details (provider, amount, dates, notes)
• Text extracted from attached documents (PDFs, photos of cards, receipts)

Never indexed:

• Passwords
• PINs
• Social security numbers
• Account routing numbers
• Anything in a field tagged as a security answer

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.

Emergency readiness checks

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 — a beneficiary written in a note instead of a structured field, for example. 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

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 vault on the device you're using.