Guides

Lost or stolen iPhone

Last updated: 2026-10-25

If your iPhone is lost or stolen while the vault is locked, what is inside stays encrypted. Here is what protects it, what does not, and what to do now.

What protects your vault

Encryption. The vault, its photos and its videos are stored encrypted. Without your master password, or your Face ID, PIN or pattern on this phone, they cannot be read.
It locks by itself. By default the vault locks as soon as you leave the app, and after one minute without use.
Your passcode is not enough. Someone who knows the iPhone passcode still cannot open the vault. If they add their own face to Face ID, Face ID stops opening the vault until the master password is entered. After a restart, only the master password works.
Guessing is slow. After two wrong attempts, each new one has to wait longer, up to a full day. If you have turned on Erase after repeated failures, the vault is destroyed when the limit you chose is reached.

What it cannot protect against

A vault taken while it was open. If someone grabs the phone with the vault on screen and keeps using it, they can see what is inside until it locks.
Someone who knows your master password, or who has watched you enter your PIN or draw your pattern.
Remote locking or erasing from us. There is no account and no server, so we cannot find, lock or erase your phone or your vault. Apple's Find My can.
Lost data without a backup. If the phone does not come back, you can only restore what was in your last backup.

What to do now

Mark the iPhone as lost in Find My, on another Apple device or at icloud.com/find.
If someone may have seen your master password, PIN or pattern, change the passwords stored in the vault for your most important accounts, starting with email.
If it was stolen, report it to the police, and ask your mobile operator to block the SIM card.
If you do not expect to get it back, you can erase it through Find My. That erases the vault too, and you can restore it from a backup on a new phone.
On your new iPhone, restore the vault from your iPhone backup, if you allowed the vault to be included, or from a backup file. You need the master password. Face ID, PIN and pattern are set up again afterwards.

Prepare before it happens

Use a master password of at least 12 characters that you can remember, such as a passphrase of several words.
Keep a recent backup: allow the vault in your iPhone backup, or export a backup file regularly and store it somewhere other than the phone.
Keep Lock when leaving the app turned on, and choose a short auto-lock time.
Turn on Apple's Stolen Device Protection in the iPhone's Face ID & Passcode settings.
If you have a backup, consider turning on Erase after repeated failures.