Recommended workflow
Set it up once, properly.
Six steps, in the order we recommend. None of them are required by the application — you can open it and start entering watches immediately — but skipping the backup steps is the single most common way a collection is lost permanently.
Before anything else — read this one
Your recovery key matters more than any other step here. It is a separate secret from your passphrase, shown once during setup and never again — it is not on your USB drives, and it is not something a vault backup replaces. Write it down by hand, on paper, and store it apart from your vault copies. There is deliberately no way to print it and no way to copy it: both would put the key on the computer it exists to protect. There is no password reset either — lose the passphrase and the recovery key together, and the collection cannot be opened by anyone, permanently.
Add one watch at a time.
Gather the photographs, documents and details for a single piece first, then enter it as completely as you can. Market values and insured values are entirely your own figures — the application does not appraise, does not fetch prices, and cannot check anything against an outside source, because it has no way to reach one. You are responsible for the accuracy of everything you enter; see the Terms for how valuations and financial figures are treated.
Review, then repeat.
Check the entry is correct before moving on to the next piece. Repeat this, one watch at a time, until the collection is complete. An entry made carefully once is worth more than a collection entered quickly and never checked.
Secure your vault — and your recovery key.
Under Data → Your backup, choose Save an encrypted backup. Make two copies on separate USB drives, and keep the drives in two separate, secure physical locations — a home safe and a bank safety-deposit box is a reasonable split.
Your recovery key is not on either drive, so the two need separate hiding places — together, a single loss takes both. Setup will not finish until you type one randomly chosen block of it back, so a key you meant to write down but did not cannot slip past.
Generate the physical documents.
Under Insurance & Sales, the Insurance schedule comes in three versions — all watches, insured only, or not insured — so you can choose how much of the collection an agent sees. Alongside it, Sales & Disposition holds a Sales dossier, which covers one watch for a buyer, and Realized gains & losses, which records what has left the collection. The Estate register lives under Owner & Succession, alongside the Legacy folio, and asks for your passphrase before it opens — it carries vault locations and access codes, so it is treated the way the sealed documents are. Each document opens in a reader inside the application first, so you can read it before deciding to save it, and saving asks before it writes anything. Your collection has no route off the computer, so nothing leaves it to produce them.
Print two copies of each and store them alongside your USB drives, so every physical location holds a complete set: the encrypted vault, and the paper record.
Maintain your records.
Repeat the backup — vault export and printed documents — whenever you make a change that matters for insurance, property or estate purposes: an acquisition, a sale, a loss, a change in coverage. The most recent backup is the only one that counts.
Enjoy the view.
Watch Vault Archive handles insurance schedules and estate planning properly, but it is also simply a place to see a whole collection organized in one view. Looking at an entire rotation laid out at once is often the most useful thing it does.
Still have a question?
Most things people ask before or during setup are already answered — backups, passphrases, imports, insurance figures, what happens if something goes wrong.