---
title: "What’s encrypted in Niv"
description: "What only you and your Space’s members can read in an encrypted Space, what Niv’s server still sees, and what works differently for now."
canonical: https://niv.md/encryption
language: en
last_updated: 2026-10-10T01:35:20.000Z
---

# What’s encrypted in Niv

In an encrypted Space, your notes are encrypted on your device before they leave it. Only you and the people you let in can read them. Our server stores and passes them along, but it can’t open them, and neither can we.

## Only you and your Space’s members can read

- Your notes, and their titles
- Folder names
- Properties and tags
- Images you add to a note
- Each note’s history: its versions and what changed
- Your Space’s name and icon
- The names you give your devices

## Our server still sees

To deliver your notes, the server keeps some facts about them:

- Your email address and when you sign in
- Who is in each Space, and their role
- That a change happened, when, how large it was, and whose device sent it
- How many notes and folders a Space has, and how they’re arranged, without their names
- Your public keys, which is how members let each other in

By law (Marco Civil da Internet), Niv also keeps access records for six months: the address you connected from, the page or action, and your browser or app. Never what you wrote.

## Pages you publish are public

Publishing a note makes a readable copy of it on the web, on purpose. That copy, its images and the site title you choose can be read by anyone with the link. Everything you don’t publish stays encrypted.

## What works differently in an encrypted Space, for now

**Images in other apps.** In Obsidian or any other editor, images in an encrypted Space don’t show: the file holds an encrypted link that only Niv can open.

**Sync now.** The Sync now button isn’t available there. Syncing still happens on its own.

**Emails.** Messages about an encrypted Space don’t name the Space or the note. Open Niv to see them.

**Niv’s cloud agent.** It can’t read an encrypted Space. Agents that run on your computer still can, because your computer has the key.

**Copying an image to a Space that isn’t encrypted.** If you paste an image from an encrypted Space into one that isn’t, its key goes along inside the note, which is readable there. Anyone who can read that note can open the image.

## If you lose both your passphrase and your recovery file

Your notes can’t be opened by anyone, including us. We don’t keep a copy of your key, so there is nothing we can reset. Keep your recovery file in two places, like a USB drive and a password manager.

If someone else in the Space can still open it, they can let you back in after you set up a new passphrase. A Space only you belong to can’t be recovered.

## When someone leaves a Space

Removing a member changes the Space’s key for everything written afterwards. They keep what they already had, including the files on their own computer.

---

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