There is one question that decides whether a backup is right for you, and it almost never shows up on the pricing page: who, besides you, can read what is in there?

It is worth understanding the possible answers before choosing, because each one charges a different price — and the price is not always money.

The three possible answers

First: the provider can, and does not tell you. Files go up as they are, or are encrypted with a key the provider controls entirely. It is the most common model and the most comfortable to use: you forget your password, click "recover", and you are back. The cost is in what you do not see — an employee with improper access, a court order, or a breach at the provider exposes readable content.

Second: nobody can, not even the provider. This is what is called zero knowledge. The key is born on your device and never leaves it in usable form. The provider stores bytes it cannot read. It is technically superior, and it has a consequence that rarely makes it into the sales material: if you lose the key, that is the end of it. No recovery, no support, no exception. The product cannot rescue you even if it wants to.

Third: the provider can, and says so to your face. That is where we are, and the rest of this article is about why we chose it.

Our answer, no hedging

In NubliVault Desktop, your files are compressed and encrypted on your computer, before they leave. What ends up stored is unreadable without the key.

But we keep a protected copy of that key. It is wrapped with a per-user derived secret and held in our custody. It is used only at your request, inside a recovery that you start.

In plain English, that means: technically, we can open your files. We do not analyze them, index them, share them with anyone, or train anything on them — but the capability exists, and an honest article says so instead of hiding it behind "end-to-end encryption".

Why we chose the option that looks worse on paper

The previous version of this product was zero knowledge, with a printed recovery kit the user had to keep. We built it, and then we took it apart.

The reason is simple and unpleasant: paper kits get lost. And whoever loses one has no rescue at all. The person who needs a backup most — the one whose computer just died, along with the drawer the paper was in — is exactly the one left with no way out.

We traded a strong technical guarantee for an operational guarantee that works on the bad day. It is a choice, not an oversight, and it has casualties: anyone who needs a backup that not even the provider can open should not use NubliVault Desktop. We would rather say that and lose the sale.

What changes in the enterprise line

In the Enterprise line, which reads storage buckets across clouds, the answer is different: the keys belong to the customer (BYOK), in the customer's own key service. The operator does not decrypt content.

That difference is not a whim. A company has process, succession, and a password vault — losing a key there is a manageable incident. An individual has none of that, and the loss is final.

How to evaluate any service, ours included

Four questions. If the answer to any of them is not written down, that absence is the answer:

Where is the key born? On my device, or on their server?
If I forget everything, can they give me my files back? If the answer is yes, then they can open them. Those are the same thing.
What happens if I stop paying? In how many days is the data deleted, and is there a warning first?
Who answers for a breach, and what does the contract say?

The second question is the one that reveals the most, and it is where marketing tends to slip. There is no service that simultaneously cannot read your files and can recover them when you lose everything. Anyone promising both at once is lying about one of them.

Our answers to the four

The key is born on your computer.
Yes, we can give your files back — and therefore we can open them.
Expired subscription: backup stops, recovery stays available for 30 days, then the data is frozen for another 30 and deleted on day 61. With warning beforehand.
Nublify Tecnologia LTDA, under Brazil's LGPD, with the details in the privacy policy and the handling described on the security page.

None of these answers is the best possible one on paper. All of them are true, and true is what we can promise.