Recovery & Rescan

Your notes live encrypted in your browser, not on a server. Lose the device and the local copy goes with it — but the notes themselves are still on-chain. This page is how you get them back.

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If you lose your device or clear your browser storage, your local notes are deleted. Reconnecting your wallet alone is not enough — recover them either by importing a note backup (instant) or by running a Rescan.

There are two ways to get your notes back on a new device. Both rebuild a fully spendable vault; they differ in speed and in whether you prepared beforehand.

Option A — Import a note backup (instant)

If you exported a note backup before losing the device, importing it rebuilds the vault without touching the chain:

1. Connect the same wallet and unlock the vault (sign the key-derivation message).
2. Open Import Notes and paste the JSON or choose the exported file.
3. Your notes appear immediately — no scan.

The backup is a plain JSON file that carries only public data (each note's commitment and its encrypted memo) — never a spending key. On import, the app decrypts each memo with your own keys: a note that decrypts is yours and comes back spendable; anything that does not is ignored. Because only the file's own memos are tried, this is not a chain scan. See Export & Import Notes.

Option B — Rescan the chain (no backup needed)

Rescan reconstructs the vault from the chain itself, so it works even with no backup. Rescan is manual — it never runs on its own. Unlocking your vault on a new device, reconnecting, or switching accounts loads whatever notes are already stored locally and stops there; a full scan walks the entire pool and is expensive, so the app only does it when you ask.

1. Connect the same wallet you originally used to set up the vault.
2. Sign the vault key derivation message when prompted. This regenerates the same encryption key from your wallet.
3. Run Rescan from the vault settings. The app scans the blockchain indexer for all encrypted commitments and attempts to decrypt each one with your key.
4. Wait for the scan to complete. Progress is shown in real time (notes scanned, notes found). Duration depends on total chain activity.
5. Recovered notes appear in your vault with their current spend status verified on-chain.

Rescan works because every note's contents travel on-chain inside an encrypted memo that only your keys can open. A view tag lets the scan skip ~255 of every 256 foreign notes, so it is far cheaper than it sounds. See Note Discovery for the mechanism.

What can be recovered

Recoverable via Rescan

• Notes from shielded deposits you made
• Notes received via private transfers
• Both spent and unspent notes

Not recoverable

• Notes never submitted to the chain
• Local drafts or test notes
• Notes created with a different wallet