Locking an export your family can still open

Some services will never hand your account to your family. ChatGPT, Claude, Notion, and most AI and note-taking tools have no legacy contact, no beneficiary form, and no deceased-user process that returns your content. The playbooks say the same thing for each of them: the only reliable path is to export while you are alive.

An export is just a file. Left as-is it is a plaintext archive of your private thinking sitting in a cloud folder. Locked, it becomes something you can store anywhere, because only your recovery circle can open it.

What “locking” actually does

AmberKey gives you an archive key alongside your vault key. Locking a file encrypts it to that key and hands you back a .age file. Nothing uploads: the file never leaves your device, and we never see it or the key.

The archive key is recovered by your circle in the same ceremony that recovers everything else, so a locked export needs no separate arrangement. It is also never rotated, which matters: an export you locked years ago still opens with the key your family recovers today.

The output is an ordinary age file. That is deliberate. It means your family is not dependent on AmberKey existing to open it, and anyone comfortable at a command line can decrypt it with the standard age tool.

Locking a file

1. Download the export from the service. The playbook for that service has the exact clicks, and warns you where the download link expires (24 hours for both OpenAI and Anthropic).
2. In AmberKey, open Backup, then Locked exports.
3. Choose the file. In Chrome and Edge you will be asked where to save the locked copy, and it is written there as it encrypts. In Firefox and Safari the browser builds the file first and then downloads it.
4. Keep the .age file somewhere durable: a cloud folder, an external drive, both. Location does not matter once it is locked, which is the point.
5. Note where you put it in your knowledge estate inventory, so your executor knows the file exists and where to look.

Delete the unlocked original once you are happy. Leaving it beside the locked copy defeats the exercise.

Large exports

Exports get big. The OpenAI Privacy Portal export with images runs to several gigabytes, and that is the case the ChatGPT playbook specifically calls out.

Locking handles large files. The encryption streams: the file is processed in pieces, so the size you can lock is not limited by your device’s memory. A progress bar shows how far along it is, because a multi-gigabyte file takes long enough that silence looks like a hang.

In Chrome or Edge the locked file is written straight to disk as it encrypts, so nothing large is ever held in memory. In Firefox or Safari the browser assembles the file first, so very large exports may still struggle there. If you have a choice and the file is over a gigabyte, use Chrome.

Unlocking is the tighter constraint. Opening a locked file in the browser still needs the whole encrypted file in memory at once, so roughly a gigabyte is comfortable and much beyond that may fail. This does not put anything at risk: because the file is standard age, the escape hatch always works.

age -d -i key.txt big-export.zip.age > big-export.zip

If you are locking something very large, it is worth trying to unlock it once, now, so you know which route your family will need.

How your family opens it

They do not need you, and they do not need us.

1. The circle performs the normal recovery, which returns the archive key along with the vault key.
2. In the recovery tool, the Open an archive export panel takes any .age file you locked and decrypts it on that device. It tries every recovered archive key, so older exports still open.
3. For a file too large for the browser, the same recovered key works with the age command line tool, as above.

The recovery tool is a single offline HTML file. It does not call us, and it keeps working whether or not AmberKey exists.

What to lock, and what not to bother with

Worth locking: AI chat exports, note archives, anything from a service with no legacy mechanism, and anything whose loss would be a genuine gap for your family.

Not worth locking: things already covered by a legacy tool. If Google’s Inactive Account Manager or Apple’s Legacy Contact will hand the content over, use that instead. A locked copy is a snapshot that ages; a legacy mechanism gives your family the live account.

Remember that every locked export is a point in time. Anything you say or create after the last export is not in it. Re-lock on the same cadence as your liveness check-ins, and keep the previous file until the new one is stored.