Encryption and your recovery key

Wild OS encrypts its part of the disk from the moment you install. Without the disk password or the recovery key, what’s on it is unreadable, even to someone who takes the disk out of the computer.

You type the disk password each time the computer starts, before anything else loads.

The recovery key

The recovery key is a second way to unlock the disk, in case you forget the password. It looks like this, six groups of five letters and numbers:

K7QMX-4RTPA-9WZ2C-HN3VE-6BJ8S-LD5YF

It only uses characters that can’t be mistaken for one another when written down, so there’s no letter O or I, and no digit 0 or 1.

The installer makes it and shows it once, on the last page. It isn’t kept on the computer. Save it there and then:

• Save to a USB stick writes Wild OS recovery key.txt to a stick you choose.
• I’ve written it down if you copied it onto paper.

Keep it somewhere other than the computer: a password manager on your phone, or the paper in a drawer at home.

Danger

If you lose both the password and the recovery key, nobody can get your files back, not even us. That’s what keeps them safe.

Using the recovery key

When the computer starts and asks for the disk password, type the recovery key instead, including the hyphens, and press Enter. It unlocks the disk just like the password.

Type it on the keyboard layout you chose in the installer. If a wrong key or password is entered, the prompt simply comes back so you can try again.

One password or two

At first start you can tick Use my disk password to sign in, so you type one password when the computer starts instead of two. See first start.

Without encryption

You can choose Don’t encrypt in the installer. The computer starts a little faster, but anyone with your laptop can read your files. We don’t recommend it, particularly on a laptop.

If the installer couldn’t add the recovery key, the last page says The recovery key could not be added, so only your disk password unlocks the disk. Your files are still encrypted.