An Encrypted Memory Should Survive a Reinstall
Encryption at rest has a failure mode nobody advertises: lose the key and a healthy store is noise. Preparing Curator's first public build meant making sure a new machine, a reinstall, or an upgrade never costs you your memory.
Encrypting a memory store at rest is the easy half. The hard half is the key. Lose it and a perfectly healthy store is just noise on a disk, and for a memory you have built over months that is a worse failure than any bad recall. It is also the failure most likely to happen to someone who is not us, on the day they reinstall or move to a new laptop.
Getting Curator ready for its first public build meant walking every path where that could happen, and closing each one.
A recovery code, shown once
A key tied to one machine alone turns a renamed machine or a fresh operating system into a risk to your data. So creating a store now shows a recovery code, once. Write it down. On a new machine, after an OS reinstall, or when you add a second environment on the same box, that code opens your store. Day to day you never see it, because the machine that set the store up opens it without asking.
Upgrades refuse instead of guessing
A store from an older Curator is not converted behind your back. It is refused, with a message naming the one command that moves it, and that command shows a dry run before it changes anything. The original is kept, and it still opens with your recovery code.
Before any change to how the store is laid out on disk, every database is copied aside together with its key. If there is not enough room for that copy, nothing changes, and Curator tells you how much space it needs.
Errors that never point at your data
The key errors a user can hit name the command that fixes them and say plainly that nothing was changed. A busy or unreadable disk is reported as what it is, not as a key problem, and no message ever suggests touching the key of a store that holds data. Resetting your whole memory moves the old store aside into a dated folder, and that copy stays readable: your recovery code still opens it.
Sealed while it waits
Conversation captured for processing is encrypted the moment it is captured, before the local model gets to it, and so is every other file Curator keeps next to the store. The capture step can lock a turn away without being able to open anything itself.
The honest limit
Without the machine that set up the store and without the recovery code, nobody can open it, including us. That is what encryption is for. Keep the code somewhere you will still find it in a year.
Where it stands
This is part of preparing Curator’s first public build. Curator is a working pre-release product that runs on your own machine and reaches your agents over MCP, and it pairs with Arbiter, TheAuditor and Warden. Follow release preparation.
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