Family recovery lets your family’s organizer help you back in if you lose your master password or Secret Key and have no recovery code. It’s your choice, and it’s off until you turn it on.
Before you turn it on
Turning it on gives the organizer a copy of your account key, sealed so that only their devices can open it. In principle, with the server’s help, they could read your vaults. Turn it on only for an organizer you trust with that.
Turn it on or off under Family, then Family recovery.
If you’re locked out
- At Forgot your master password?, enter your email address and choose Ask my family organizer.
- Vallkey emails you a code. Enter it, and keep the page open: the request lasts an hour.
- Your screen shows a request code: four groups of five digits. Call the organizer, or see them, and read it out.
- The organizer opens Family, types the code you read, and chooses Help them.
- Your page continues by itself. Choose a new master password, and save the new Emergency Kit it shows.
Your other devices are signed out. Log in on each with your new master password and new Secret Key.
If you’re the organizer
Help only someone you’ve spoken to, and only if the code they read out matches. The code is what proves the request is theirs: helping without comparing it would hand their account to whoever made the request. Turn down refuses a request.
The organizer has no one to recover them, so an organizer should keep a recovery code.
Last updated October 3, 2026