Create your first vault, step by step

Before you start

Confirm your email address first. The link is in the message sent when you registered. A vault cannot be armed on an unverified account, because the reminder emails that stop you triggering it by accident would have nowhere to go.

1. Open the vault form

Go to Vaults and choose New vault. Nothing is armed until you explicitly arm it, so you can save a draft and come back.

2. Name it for yourself, not the recipient

The title is only ever shown to you, in your dashboard and your activity log. Call it something you will recognise at a glance a year from now: Passwords for Sarah beats Vault 1.

3. Write the message

This is the body of the email your recipient receives. Write it to someone who has no idea this service exists and no idea why they are being emailed by it. Two lines of context at the top saves a great deal of confusion:

If you are reading this, I have not checked in to My Signal Vault for a month. It sends this automatically. Everything you need is below.

Then be specific. Where things are, what the passwords open, who to call, what you want done. Assume the reader is upset and skim reading.

4. Name the recipient

One email address per vault. Check it twice, character by character. A typo here is the single most common way a vault fails: it arms correctly, counts down correctly, delivers correctly, and goes to nobody. Nothing is sent to the recipient before delivery, so a wrong address stays invisible until the day it matters.

If two people need the same thing, make two vaults with the same message.

5. Choose the interval

Presets run from one hour to thirty days; Pro and Lifetime accounts can set any interval in that range. Choose the longest one you are comfortable with. You can shorten it later without losing anything.

6. Attach files, if you have any

Upload them under Files first, then attach them to the vault. Attachments are encrypted in storage and decrypted only at the moment of delivery.

7. Arm it

Save, then press Arm. The countdown starts at that moment and the vault appears on your dashboard with its deadline. That deadline is shown in your own timezone, which you can set on your profile.

8. Do the thing everyone skips

Put a recurring reminder in your own calendar, a little before the deadline, that says "check in". We send reminders at 75 and 90 percent of the interval, but those are emails, and emails get missed. A calendar alert you control is the difference between a vault that works for years and one that fires the first time you are on holiday.