What if my secret is unrecoverable?

An unrecoverable secret means that Guardians have not responded to check-ins confirming they still hold the shares. Your secret may or may not still be recoverable. Here are some common reasons:

One or more guardians may have deleted the SecretShield App.

After the Guardians reinstall, login, and connect as contact, you can (re)save the secret to them as a new secret by cloning the old one.

A secret can be cloned if either a "local" copy exists or if it is available as "recovered" as displayed on the SecretShield home dashboard. Tap "local" or "recovered" which will open the secret, then tap clone, assign the new set of guardians, trustees, etc., and save. After the save is successful, you can optionally delete the old copy of the secret.

One or more guardians may have new mobile phones (the secret does not automatically transfer).

After the Guardians reinstall, login, and connect as contact, you can (re)save the secret to them as a new secret by cloning the old one.

Case 1: My guardian is online and I'm pretty sure they have the secret.

Confirm that the Guardian has push notifications enabled. Have the Guardian open SecretShield and go to SecretShield's settings in the app (furthest right button in the toolbar). On the top of the Settings screen, if push notifications are not enabled, there will be a button to enable them. Have them pick that option and enable notifications.

SecretShield sends silent push notifications between apps as a battery-efficient way to verify that a Guardian still holds the assigned shares. The app uses regular notifications when adding a contact or requesting recovery to evoke a timely response. In either case, push notifications are important to the core app functionality, and important to have them enabled.

While unlikely, push notifications are disabled for the phone or tablet as a whole (as opposed to the SecretShield app). Here are links to Apple for iOS and Google for Android with additional details.

Case 2: My guardian is online and I'm pretty sure they have the secret.

Confirm that the Guardian has never deleted and reinstalled the SecretShield app, or that they have never logged out of SecretShield via the App's settings screen and logged back in. If they did, the shares they were holding would have been wiped (deleted). You can (re)save the secret to them as a new secret by cloning the old one.

Force closing (aka terminating) the SecretShield app by swiping up from the iPhone App Switcher or Android Recent Apps/Overview will prevent proper operation of the SecretShield app. Specifically, doing this will prevent the battery efficient refresh to verify Guardians and/or for Guardians to respond to verifications. In short, it is best to avoid this, even Apple's own software SVP suggests against it.

Case 3: My guardian is online and I'm pretty sure they have the secret.

SecretShield uses a battery efficient background refresh to verify Guardians still hold the shares of your secret. If for some reason that is disabled, either you app will not regularly check or their app will not responded to such checks even if they still hold the shares, resulting in your app warning you that the secret is not recoverable.

On Android, if they "swipe-up" to kill the app, Android may prevent the verification from running. The refresh is battery efficient, please notify the Guardian to simply not kill the app.

On iPhones/iPads, there are 2 potential causes. First, if they "swipe-up" to kill the app, iOS may prevent or otherwise limit the verification from running. Please notify the Guardian to simply not kill the app.

Second for iPhones/iPads, the system's "Settings -> General -> Background App Refresh" must be turned on and in the list at that location, SecretShield must be enabled.

Just as with Android, for iPhones/iPads, SecretShield's background refresh is designed to be battery efficient.