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If things go wrong

A short honest list of what can happen, and what it means.

I have lost my passphrase

If you still have the recovery sheet — the printed page with the QR code from setup — you can recover access. Open BlindProof, choose Recover with recovery sheet, hold the sheet up to your camera, and set a new passphrase. Your existing record is intact.

If you have also lost the recovery sheet, we cannot help. Nothing we hold is readable without the passphrase or the recovery code. This is the same promise — and the same risk — that any end-to-end encrypted service makes. The evidence for any work BlindProof recorded before this point is no longer accessible.

What you can do from there: start a new BlindProof with a new passphrase, from today. The record resumes from whatever date you begin again. Any future bundle will cover the work from that date onward.

I am moving to a new computer

You do not need to worry about the proof surviving. The important stamped records live outside your machine, on the public registrar. Even if BlindProof the company disappeared tomorrow, the PDF you have already been given would still check out, years from now.

To pick up on a new computer: install BlindProof, sign in with the same email and passphrase, and point it at your writing folder again. It will continue where it left off. The old computer can be retired without ceremony.

My computer stopped working before I could produce a bundle

As long as the daily sync reached the registrar, the evidence is safe. The saves from earlier in the writing are already registered and stamped in the public record. You will not lose work that was already captured.

What you may lose is saves from the final day or two, if they had not yet been synced. If this is a worry, BlindProof has a Sync now button — press it before any delivery deadline, to make sure the latest work is captured.

BlindProof the company disappears

This is worth being explicit about. BlindProof is a small operation, and no small operation can promise to exist forever. We have built the product so that this does not matter for you.

The proof bundles you have already produced are self-contained. They depend only on the public registrar, which is independent of us and used by many people for many purposes. The checking tool ships inside each bundle; it is only a couple of hundred lines of code, in a language (Python) that is widely available and is likely to remain so for decades. A proof bundle produced today will still verify in twenty years, whether or not BlindProof is still here.

What you would lose if we disappeared: the ability to produce new bundles from saves that have not yet been delivered. So if the news reaches you that BlindProof is closing down, produce a bundle for whatever you have in progress. That bundle will then stand on its own.

My publisher cannot run the checking tool

The tool is deliberately small and stdlib-only, so any publisher with a modern computer should be able to run it. If yours cannot, a couple of options:

  • Ask them to forward it to their technical team or IT department — it is a single file, under a couple of hundred lines, and reads plainly.
  • Deliver the bundle to a solicitor, an archivist, or an academic institution in your field; they are likely equipped to run it on your behalf and provide a short certification of the result.
  • Contact us. While we do not see your manuscript, we can walk a publisher through running the tool.

The bundle is designed so that anyone can verify it. That "anyone" does not need to be BlindProof.