Bring your photos, videos and files into Ciphergrove without losing their order or their folders. Do it slowly: keep the old app until you have checked that everything arrived.
Before you start
- Keep the old app installed until you have checked that everything arrived in Ciphergrove. Nothing in Ciphergrove deletes anything from the old app.
- Get your files out of the old app. Most vault apps have an Unhide, Export or Restore to gallery option for photos and videos. Choose it for the folders you want to move. The files return to your phone’s normal gallery or to a folder you pick.
- Make a Ciphergrove backup first. In Ciphergrove, open Settings, then Backup & restore, and save a backup and your recovery code. See Backup and recovery.
Three ways to bring files in
Import files
In Ciphergrove, tap +, then Import files, and pick photos, videos, documents or anything else. Ciphergrove keeps each photo’s own date, so your pictures land in the right place in time, and it keeps the order you picked them in. You can sort by Date taken or Date added from the Sort button.
Import a folder
Tap +, then Import a folder, and choose a folder on your phone. Ciphergrove makes a folder with the same name and the same sub-folders inside it, and puts each file in the folder it came from. Large folders import in the background, and you can keep using the app while they do.
Transfer from a computer
If the files are on a computer (a folder you exported from the old app, a backup drive, a photo library), you can send them straight to your phone over your home Wi-Fi without a cable or an account.
- Put the phone and the computer on the same Wi-Fi network.
- In Ciphergrove, tap +, then Transfer from a computer. The phone shows an address and a six-digit code.
- On the computer, open a web browser and type the address exactly as shown. It starts with
https://and ends with a port number. - Your browser will say the connection is not private. That is expected: the phone made its own security certificate for this one session and your browser has never seen it. Choose Advanced, then Continue. The phone also shows the beginning of the certificate’s fingerprint, so you can compare it with the one your browser shows if you want to be sure.
- Enter the code, then drop files or whole folders on the page, or use its buttons. Folders keep their sub-folders. Keep the phone screen on until every file shows Done.
How it stays private: only devices on the same network can connect, and only with the code. The connection is encrypted, each transfer uses a new code and a new key, and the code locks after five wrong tries. The transfer stops when you leave the screen, after 30 minutes, or when you press Stop. Nothing goes through the internet and nothing is stored on our servers, because we do not have any.
Afterwards
- Check the counts. Open a few folders and compare the number of files with what you had.
- Let Ciphergrove remove the originals. After an import it can offer to delete the plain copies from your phone’s gallery. Say yes only once you have looked at the imported files.
- Delete leftovers. Some apps leave copies in a hidden folder, in the gallery, or in cloud storage. Look there too, then uninstall the old app when you are sure.
- Make a fresh backup in Ciphergrove now that everything is in one place.
Things that can go wrong
- Files you exported are still named strangely. Some apps rename files when they hide them. Ciphergrove keeps the names it is given; you can rename any file afterwards.
- An old app exports only to its own format. Contact that app’s support and ask how to get your original files out. Ciphergrove cannot read other apps’ private storage.
- The computer cannot reach the phone. Some guest or office Wi-Fi networks stop devices from seeing each other. Use your home network, or a phone hotspot with the computer connected to it.
- Videos do not play after import. Tell us the file type at support@radioactivecoding.com. Every file is stored safely even when this phone cannot play it.
Questions? See Support.