Anything Not Saved Will Be Lost
Most of the tech industry would rather you not think about this point. Information is fragile. It gets more fragile when it lives on other people’s computers.
The examples are not hypothetical. A bombing in Nashville knocked out internet, cell, and 911 service across Tennessee and into neighboring states. Some 911 centers were down for over a week. A single misconfigured network element disconnected every device on a nationwide cell network for hours. Google Cloud accidentally deleted the entire account of a $135 billion pension fund, backups included. The only reason that story has a happy ending is that someone kept backups outside the provider. Amazon reached into people’s Kindles and deleted books they paid for (including 1984). Steam can revoke games you “own.” None of this required a disaster movie. Just a normal week somewhere.
If you keep your own digital library, you already understand this. You probably have Kiwix on a tablet, Project Gutenberg on a microSD card, and field manuals in three formats. The question is not whether to keep your own copies. The question is where the rest of your digital life lives. For most of us, the honest answer is: in an account, behind a login, on infrastructure someone else controls.
That is the problem Merka Vault is built for.
The cloud is somebody else’s computer. Act accordingly.
Merka starts from a simple premise. You will take better care of your data than anyone else, because nobody else has the same stake in it.
So the design follows from that:
- Your data lives with you first. Photos, documents, scans, and records stay on hardware in your home. You can access them on your network, not behind someone else’s login page.
- The cloud is demoted to safety net. Backups are encrypted before they leave your control, and they are provider-agnostic. A storage provider holds ciphertext it cannot read. If that provider vanishes tomorrow, your recovery does not go with it.
- The keys stay with you. Cosmic Rocks supports the product without the ability to read your data. Support never requires a back door into your vault.
- Recovery is a drill, not a hope. Hardware fails. Houses flood. Drives die on a shelf. The standard we hold ourselves to: if your original hardware is gone, you can get everything back without handing custody to anyone. A backup you have never restored is a theory, not a backup.
That last point matches the 3-2-1 rule you already follow for your archives: multiple copies, multiple media, at least one off-site. Merka builds the encrypted, off-site part in. It does not make the off-site provider the owner of your recovery.
The same discipline you already use for your archives.
Your data, plus at least two backups. One copy is never a backup.
Don't trust a single drive, disk, or service to never fail.
At least one copy lives somewhere else, in case the worst happens at home.
Start with the hardware you already have
You do not need to buy anything to test this model. We would rather you did not until you have verified it yourself.
The free version runs on Windows, macOS, or Linux. It is the real product, with the same identity model and native apps as the hardware. If you have a NUC, an Optiplex, or a mini-PC already in a closet, the free path includes supported always-on hardware too.
When you want a purpose-built, always-on home for the family’s data, there is the Merka Vault appliance. When downtime is not acceptable, Merka Vault Business is a three-node set built for continuity. The system keeps running even while a node is down.
One rule worth knowing up front: multi-user access only ships on supported hardware. Adding a spouse or a recovery contact raises the stakes, and we do not ship features we cannot make safe. If the hardware cannot support shared access reliably, the answer is no.
Native apps, because the browser is somebody else’s surface too
Everything is native: iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux. There is no web admin panel guarding your life’s archive. Browsers safely render anything the internet throws at them. That is a fine job description, and the wrong foundation for your most sensitive data. Native apps use platform security and local device identity instead.
It also means the product works like a product, not a server you babysit. You have enough projects.
Dependability is the point
The more dependent you become on other people, the more you find out that a lot of people are not dependable. The answer is not to depend on nobody. It is to become the dependable one, so other people can depend on you.
That is exactly the person Merka Vault is built for. The one who keeps the archive. The one the family calls when the photos are gone or the account is locked. Your data lives under your roof. Your backups survive any single provider. You have practiced your recovery plan before the day you need it.
Anything not saved will be lost. So save it. Properly, under your own keys.