Dropped your phone in Lake Zurich: what you get back and what you don't

The question came from the support inbox, verbatim: "My phone fell into Lake Zurich while sailing. Now what?" A good chance to answer this properly once and for all — because at HIY the answer isn't one single "here's how you get everything back", but three separate answers to three separate things.

Why three separate paths at all

The obvious setup would be one central account managing identity, friends list, and chat history together — one login, everything back. We deliberately didn't build that. A single recovery mechanism that hands everything back at once is also a single point that could expose everything at once, if it's compromised — whether through an attack on us or a legal request. Three separate paths mean: even if one fails or gets attacked, the other two stay untouched. The price is that you have to take care of each one individually.

Path 1: your identity — via ortino.AUTH

Your account itself — that you're you, with your name and your profile — runs through ortino.AUTH, our shared login system for all Ortino services. When you set it up, you set a backup PIN (if not: please do it now, under Settings → Account). With email confirmation and this PIN, you get your account back on a new device. This is the only one of the three paths we actively support — because account recovery without any fallback at all would simply lock too many people out permanently.

Path 2: your friends list — reconfirms, doesn't restore

This gets more interesting, because we don't technically "restore" it in the classic sense at all. Who's friends with whom doesn't sit as a readable list on a server that we could just send back to you after login. Instead, every friendship reconfirms itself: as soon as your new device is online with your restored identity, your existing friends' devices automatically recognize that it's you again (via the same identity check as in Path 1), and the connection rebuilds itself from both sides. To you, it looks like a restoration. Technically it's a series of independent reconfirmations — more robust against abuse, but also the reason it can take a day or two before all your friends are "there" again: it depends on when their devices are next online.

Path 3: your chat history — and here's the honest bad news

Now the part that hurts. As described in the StrongBox article, your messages sit encrypted with a key that never left your old phone's security chip. If the phone is in Lake Zurich, that key is in Lake Zurich with it. There's no copy on our end we could hand back to you — that was the whole point of the construction.

What comes back is only what you saved yourself beforehand: under Settings → Back up history, HIY offers a local, also encrypted export you can store wherever you choose — your own cloud, an external drive, wherever. Without that export beforehand, the history is gone. That's not fine print we're hiding; we keep the "No backup of your history yet" notice prominently in the settings menu until you've created one.

What this means in practice

Identity: comes back reliably, if a backup PIN was set. Friends: come back, but staggered, because every connection reconfirms individually. History: only comes back if you saved it yourself beforehand — otherwise, it doesn't. Three paths, three different answers, and yes: part of the responsibility sits with you, not with us. That's less convenient than a single "everything restored", but it's the honest flip side of us not being able to read anything you didn't explicitly hand us to keep.