Multiple Vaults, One App: Keep Work, Family, and Private Life Separate
Your life is not one folder, so your vault should not be one bucket. Kinship Vault now holds several separate vaults on a single device, each with its own encryption key and its own unlock, so what happens in one can never spill into the others.
Most people keep one pile for everything: work logins next to the family passport scans, the shared streaming password next to the private ones. It is convenient right up until it is not. Hand your unlocked phone to a colleague to show them a document and your personal life is one swipe away. Share a login with a housemate and they can see everything. One bucket means one blast radius.
The answer is not a second app and a second password to forget. It is compartments: several vaults inside the one app you already trust, each sealed on its own. This is the most requested capability we have ever shipped, and it changes how the whole app feels.
Key takeaways
- Create several vaults on one device, for example Personal, Work, and Family, each holding its own logins, documents, and photos.
- Every vault is separately keyed: its own database, its own encrypted files, its own master key in the Secure Enclave. Unlocking one does not unlock the rest.
- Switch vaults from the home screen on iPhone and iPad, or the sidebar on Mac, and manage them all from Manage Vaults.
- Move or copy items between vaults as your life changes; add a shared vault for people you trust, or a sensitive vault behind its own password.
Why separate vaults, and not just folders
Folders sort things; they do not protect them. Everything in a folder is unlocked the moment the vault is unlocked, and it rides the same key. Separate vaults are a different idea. Each one is a genuinely independent store, with its own encryption key sealed in your device's Secure Enclave. Opening your Personal vault reveals nothing in your Work vault, because the key that decrypts Work is not in play.
That is the crucial difference: the boundary between vaults is cryptographic, not cosmetic. It is the same principle as giving each document its own key, applied one level up. The point is to shrink the blast radius. If a single vault is ever exposed, whether by a shoulder-surfer, a shared unlock, or a mistake, the others are untouched because they were never decrypted.
Separate vaults are compartments, not folders. The wall between them is a key you do not hold while the other vault is open.
Three vaults, three jobs
How you divide things is up to you. A few patterns we see:
| Vault | What tends to live there |
|---|---|
| Personal | Your everyday logins, IDs, passport, insurance, private photos. This is your original vault, unchanged. |
| Work or clients | Business logins, contracts, licenses. Kept off your personal life, and easy to hand over or wind down without touching anything else. |
| Family (shared) | The household accounts, the Wi-Fi password, the kids' documents. A shared vault the people you trust can open on their own devices. |
| Sensitive | The handful of things that deserve a second wall: a sensitive vault sealed behind its own password, above and beyond Face ID. |
How it works, day to day
Switching vaults
On iPhone and iPad, your active vault is right at the top of the home screen; tap to switch. On Mac, your vaults sit in the sidebar. When you switch, the whole app re-keys to that vault, so you only ever see one vault's logins, documents, and photos at a time. There is no risk of the Work vault's data bleeding into a Personal screen.
Creating and shaping a vault
Open Manage Vaults and choose Add Vault. Give it a name, a color, and an icon, the same premium picker you already know from categories, so each vault is instantly recognizable at a glance. From here you can also rename, recolor, or delete a vault; deleting one permanently erases only that vault's data and leaves the rest alone.
Moving things between vaults
Life gets reorganized. A login that started out personal becomes a shared household account; a client project wraps up. Move or Copy Items lets you pick logins and documents in one vault and move or copy them into another, in bulk, without retyping anything. Copy keeps both; move relocates.
Every vault keeps the full promise
Adding vaults does not water anything down. Each vault is a first-class Kinship Vault: on-device encryption, Face ID or Touch ID unlock, AutoFill for its logins, passkeys, and its own recovery. And each vault gets its own private iCloud sync stream, so your Work vault and your Personal vault reach your other devices without ever mixing. There is still no Kinship server that can read any of it.
Where to go next
Multiple vaults is the foundation. Two capabilities build straight on top of it:
- Shared vaults let you invite the people you trust into a vault, end-to-end encrypted, with no server in the middle and the power to revoke access at any time.
- Sensitive vaults add a second wall around your most private things: a vault with its own password that your recovery phrase deliberately cannot reach.
One app. As many walls as your life needs.
Keep work, family, and private life in separate, separately-keyed vaults, switch with a tap, and share only what you mean to. On iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Explore Kinship Vault