Collector’s library · Documentation
Cloud storage is not a backup.
Most people believe their collection record is backed up because it sits in a synced folder. Sync and backup solve different problems, and the difference only becomes visible at the moment one of them was needed.
Sync makes the same file available in several places. That is genuinely useful and it is not protection, because it propagates whatever happens to the file — including deletion, corruption, encryption by ransomware, and an accidental overwrite. A synced mistake is a mistake everywhere, within seconds.
What a backup actually requires
Not reachable from the machine it protects.
A drive permanently mounted, or a folder that syncs automatically, shares the fate of the computer. Anything that can reach the original can damage the copy.
More than one point in time.
Corruption is often noticed late. A single mirrored copy is already corrupt by then; versions are what allow recovery to a moment before the damage.
Restored at least once.
An untested backup is a belief, not a protection. Most failures are discovered during the first restore attempt, which is usually also the only one that mattered.
A different building.
Fire, flood and burglary take rooms rather than files. A backup in the same drawer as the computer is a copy, not an offsite one.
The complication specific to collections
For most documents, the standard advice is to use a cloud backup service and stop worrying. A collection record is the awkward case, because the file is a complete inventory of your valuables — photographs, serial numbers, values, and often enough context to locate them.
That does not rule out cloud backup. It changes the requirement: the record must be encrypted before it leaves your computer, so that what is stored is unreadable to the service holding it and to anyone who later obtains it. Encryption applied by the provider, to data they can also decrypt, does not meet that standard.
An arrangement that works
- Export an encrypted copy of the record — encrypted by you, before it moves.
- Put it on a drive kept somewhere else: an office, a relative's house, a bank box.
- Keep the previous copy when you make a new one. Two generations is enough to survive a corruption noticed late.
- Store any passphrase separately from the drive. Together in one place, a single loss takes both.
- Restore one, once, to confirm the file opens and is complete.
- Repeat after anything significant — a new acquisition, a valuation round, a service.
Photograph libraries sync by default
The most common unintended copy is not the record — it is the phone photographs of every watch and every warranty card, uploaded automatically to a general-purpose cloud library. That library is a complete visual inventory, and almost nobody chose to put it there.
How Watch Vault Archive handles this — and what it leaves to you
The application exports a portable encrypted file suitable for exactly this, sealed with the same encryption as everything else, so a copy can sit in cloud storage without being readable there. What it will not do is make the backup for you. Your collection has no route off the machine on its own, and there is no scheduler and no reminder — taking the export, moving it somewhere else and testing it are entirely yours, and if both your passphrase and recovery key are lost, no copy can be opened by anyone.
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