Volla Recovery

What is Volla Recovery and what is it for?

Volla Recovery is a backup app for Android phones that keeps copies of your data on devices belonging to people you trust rather than with one cloud provider. It encrypts backups on the phone, spreads them across that small circle of friends, and uses Holochain so the pieces can be found and put back together when you need them.

Volla Recovery is the backup app Volla introduced alongside its Holochain-based phone software. When the Volla Messages app began shipping on the Quintus handset, the Holochain project's blog described Recovery as the follow-up: a personal backup service for the same privacy-focused phones, built so that what is on a phone can be kept without handing it to a company's servers.

In use it behaves like a small private club for your data. The app encrypts backups on the phone, divides them into fragments, and spreads those fragments across devices belonging to friends and family who have agreed to hold them. You build that circle by exchanging contact and invite codes, and each person decides how much storage to offer. Restoring means asking those same devices for the pieces back.

A typical path is a new phone: during Android's setup wizard you can choose Volla Recovery, browse the backups your circle holds, and pull back contacts, messages, photos, apps and settings — or select only part of them. The repository README documents the setup, invite and restore steps, and Volla's Cloud page describes the same idea from the phone maker's side.

From 3 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.