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Self-Healing & Repair

One of Necron Vault Manager's most powerful features is its ability to automatically detect and repair damaged or missing files across vault storage locations. By maintaining multiple copies of your encrypted data, the vault can heal itself — restoring correct copies from healthy locations without any user intervention.

How Self-Healing Works

The core principle is simple: if a file exists at Location A but is missing or damaged at Location B, copy the good version from A to B.

Building an Inventory

When a vault is opened or an integrity check runs, the app builds a complete inventory of every encrypted file across all active, online locations. For each file, it records which locations have a copy and whether each copy is present, damaged, or missing.

Choosing a Source for Repair

When a repair is needed, the system chooses the best source:

  1. If the primary location has a good copy, it is preferred
  2. Otherwise, the first available location with a good copy is used
  3. If no good copy exists at any location, the file is marked as unrecoverable

Automatic Repair (On Vault Open)

Every time you open a vault, a fast missing-files check runs automatically in the background:

  1. The app checks which files exist at each location
  2. Files that are present at some locations but missing at others are identified
  3. Missing copies are restored from a healthy source
  4. A summary notification appears if any repairs were made

This automatic check verifies file presence only (not content integrity), keeping it fast enough to run on every vault open without noticeable delay.

Note

Automatic repair runs silently in the background. You'll only see a notification if repairs were actually needed. If all locations are consistent, the vault opens instantly with no interruption.

Manual Full Repair (Integrity Check)

For comprehensive verification and repair, trigger a full integrity check from the inspector panel. This verifies every file's content and repairs both missing and damaged copies.

What Gets Detected

Problem Result
File corruption Detected and replaced from a healthy copy
File tampering Detected and replaced from a healthy copy
File truncation Detected and replaced from a healthy copy
File renamed on disk Detected and corrected
File deleted Detected and restored from another location

Repair Actions

  • Missing file → Copied from a healthy location
  • Damaged file → Overwritten with a healthy copy
  • Renamed file → Corrected to the proper filename
  • Unrecoverable → No good copy exists anywhere; flagged for your awareness

Self-Healing Across Cloud Providers

The self-healing mechanism works seamlessly across different storage providers. For example:

File #42 is corrupted on Dropbox due to a sync conflict. The Local copy and Google Drive copy are both healthy. The app copies the healthy version from Local to repair the Dropbox copy. All three locations now have identical, verified files.

Tip

Using locations on different providers dramatically improves self-healing resilience. A bug or outage at one cloud provider won't affect your other locations, giving the system a healthy source to repair from.

Limitations

Self-healing has some limitations to be aware of:

  • Offline locations cannot be repaired until they come back online. Repairs happen the next time the vault is opened with that location accessible.
  • Simultaneous failure across all locations is unrecoverable. If the same file is damaged or missing at every location, no repair is possible. This is extremely unlikely with 3+ diverse locations.
  • Automatic repair checks presence only — it does not verify file content. Use the manual integrity check for full verification.

Warning

If you lose your dongle and all copies of your key material, no amount of self-healing can recover your files. Self-healing repairs storage-level problems, but the dongle remains the key to your data. Always maintain a backup dongle.

Best Practices for Self-Healing

  1. Use at least 2–3 locations on different providers
  2. Run periodic integrity checks for critical vaults (the manual full check)
  3. Keep all locations online as much as possible — offline locations accumulate drift
  4. Check integrity after incidents — power failures, sync errors, or disk issues
  5. Maintain a backup dongle — self-healing repairs data, but can't replace a lost key

Next Steps