How Recollect keeps your notes secure

Recollect encrypts your notes in transit and at rest, keeps every account’s notes separate, and gives you tools to lock down your account. Your notes aren’t end-to-end encrypted, though. This article explains why, and what protects them instead.

How your notes are encrypted#

• In transit: every connection between your devices and Recollect uses HTTPS.
• At rest: each note’s title, text, preview, version history, and Trash copy are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they’re saved. So is the copy Recollect keeps for real-time editing. Everything else in the database, such as tag names and account details, is protected by the database’s own storage encryption.
• Files you attach to notes are stored in your own Backblaze B2 account, not Recollect’s.

Why notes aren’t end-to-end encrypted#

With end-to-end encryption, only your devices hold the keys, so not even the service can read your notes. That’s strong protection, but it would rule out features Recollect is built around:

• Real-time collaboration. Recollect merges everyone’s edits as they type. With end-to-end encryption, every collaborator would need the note’s key, and removing someone would mean re-encrypting the note.
• Public sharing. A shared note is a fast web page that loads without JavaScript and shows a preview card when you post the link. Recollect can’t build a page it can’t read.
• Features that work on your notes, like note previews, finding duplicate notes, creating notes by email, saving articles, sending notes to WordPress, EmDash, or Inkwell, and connecting AI assistants you choose.
• Account recovery. With end-to-end encryption, a forgotten password means your notes are gone for good. With Recollect, you can reset it.

Most note and document apps, including Google Docs and Notion, work the same way.

What protects your notes instead#

Your account#

• Passwords are stored as one-way hashes, never as plain text, and repeated sign-in attempts are limited.
• You can set up two-factor authentication or sign in with a passkey.
• Resetting your password signs you out on every device. So does Sign out everywhere in Settings → Security, which is useful if you lose a device.

Your notes#

• Each account’s notes are kept separate from every other account’s.
• Notes are private until you share them. When you collaborate on a note, you choose whether each person can view or edit it, and removing someone takes away their access right away.
• Attached files are scanned for malware, and infected files are quarantined. Downloads use short-lived links that Recollect only creates after checking that you have access.

Your devices#

• Signing out removes the notes saved on that device.
• Deleting your account permanently deletes your notes and your account.

Behind the scenes#

• Recollect’s admin tools only accept connections from approved network addresses.
• Recollect has been through several security audits, and every critical and high-severity finding has been fixed.
• The database is backed up continuously. You can also restore a deleted note from the Trash or an earlier version from a note’s history.

What Recollect doesn’t encrypt#

• Images in notes are served from Cloudflare’s image network at long, unguessable addresses. Anyone who has an image’s address can open it, so don’t share an image’s address if you want it to stay private.
• Notes saved on your device for offline use rely on your device’s own protection, such as its passcode and disk encryption.
• Recollect’s servers can read your notes, because that’s what makes the features above work.

If end-to-end encryption matters most to you#

End-to-end encryption protects against one specific risk: the company running a service, or someone who breaks into its servers, reading your notes. If that’s your main concern, an end-to-end encrypted app is a better fit.

Accounts are far more often compromised through reused passwords, phishing, lost devices, or links shared too widely. End-to-end encryption doesn’t help with those, and they’re what Recollect’s protections focus on.