How do I back up my walks?

The backup goes into a private folder of your own Google Drive that only Walkable can reach. What lands there is encrypted before it leaves your phone, so Google holds a file it cannot open — not your routes, not your coordinates, not your photos or notes.

This is a real change from how backup used to work. The earlier version saved an ordinary readable file, which is why uploads were switched off for a release rather than left running. What Google can still see is that a file exists and roughly how big it is.

The key that unlocks your backup is derived from a recovery key that exists only where you put it. Walkable never sends it anywhere and never stores it — not on your phone, and certainly not on a server, because there is no Walkable server in this at all.

That is what makes 'Google cannot read your backup' a true statement rather than a comforting one. It also means that if you lose the recovery key and lose the phone, the backup is permanently unreadable. Those are the same fact, seen from two directions.

You can replace the recovery key at any time from the backup screen. Your backup stays exactly where it is; only the small piece that wraps the key is rewritten, and the old key stops working immediately.

Backups made by older versions of Walkable are still readable, and restoring from one works exactly as it did. You do not need a recovery key for those, because they were never encrypted.

The first time an encrypted backup succeeds, Walkable removes the old readable copy from your Drive. Photos are handled one at a time, and each readable file is only deleted once its encrypted replacement is safely stored.