Recovery without the app
Open your encrypted files on any computer
Your files are encrypted with standard AES‑256‑GCM — not a proprietary format. With your Recovery Key you can decrypt them yourself, on any computer, even without Voynich. The script is short and readable, so you can see exactly what it does.
Source: github.com/yybd/voynich-recover — read every line before you run it.
What you need
- The encrypted file — ends in
.enc, or a password vault.mdvault. - Your Recovery Key — the code from “Recovery Setup”, in the form
XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-…. - Python 3 — on macOS it comes with the Xcode Command Line Tools; on Windows download it free from python.org and tick “Add Python to PATH”.
Download the script
A single, readable Python file — open source, so you can verify exactly what it does before trusting it with your key.
Or in a terminal:
curl -O https://storage.bdtech.app/file-encryption/recover/decrypt.pyDecrypt — macOS and Linux
-
Install the library (once)
python3 -m pip install cryptography -
Decrypt the file
The script asks for your Recovery Key — paste it (input is hidden and is not saved to your terminal history).
python3 ~/Downloads/decrypt.py ~/Downloads/secret.txt.enc -
Get your file
The decrypted file is saved next to it as
secret.txt.enc.decrypted. The script also prints the original file name — rename the file back to it.
A password vault (.mdvault)? Same process — just set an output name ending in .md to get readable Markdown:
python3 ~/Downloads/decrypt.py ~/Downloads/passwords.mdvault -o passwords.mdWindows
Install Python from python.org and tick “Add Python to PATH”. Then open PowerShell and run the same commands, with python instead of python3.
If something doesn’t work
- “Could not decrypt” / wrong key. If the file itself is valid, the key doesn’t match — usually because the file was encrypted on another device. Use that device’s Recovery Key.
- “Missing dependency”. The install step didn’t complete. Run
python3 -m pip install cryptographyagain.