Troubleshooting

If decryption keeps failing or you land in a unlock/Retry loop, the most likely cause is a passphrase that doesn't match the one a file was encrypted with, a typo, a different keyboard layout, or an old passphrase. zcrypt can't tell you the passphrase is wrong before it tries to decrypt, because there's nothing readable on the server to check it against.

• •Re-enter the passphrase carefully: watch for caps lock and trailing spaces.
• •Lock the vault and unlock again to clear any cached attempt, then retry.
• •If you have multiple accounts, confirm you're signed into the right one.

A password-protected folder is sealed under its own key, separate from your account passphrase. Having the vault unlocked is not enough: the folder stays locked until you enter its specific password.

• •Open the folder and enter the folder password (not your account passphrase) when prompted.
• •Remember that each protected folder can have a different password. Use the one set for that folder.
• •If you removed the password earlier, the folder's files were re-keyed back to your account passphrase; unlock the vault normally.

More detail in Per-folder encryption.

Uploads are chunked and resumable, so a stall is rarely fatal. If progress stops, a dropped connection, a closed tab, a sleeping laptop: the chunks already received are kept server-side, and the transfer can pick up where it left off.

• •Retry or resume the transfer from the transfer manager: only the missing chunks are re-sent.
• •Check your network connection; large files over flaky links may pause and resume several times.
• •Leave the tab open while a big upload finishes, or use the desktop app for long transfers.

See Transfer manager for pause, resume, and retry controls.

Each storage platform has its own size ceiling per repository, and zcrypt stores a given file's chunks on a single platform. A single file can be at most 10 GiB, and a very large file can exceed what a platform comfortably holds. zcrypt rotates to a fresh repository automatically as repos fill, but the headroom still varies a lot between backends.

• •For large files, use Telegram: it has no storage ceiling and is what Auto picks first. Hugging Face is capped at 100 GB per free account, so it does not add room by itself.
• •Confirm the target platform actually has free space; rotation creates new repos but can't exceed your account's quota.
• •Splitting a huge archive into smaller files can also help spread it across the pool.

How rotation works: Repo pool & rotation.

If uploads or downloads start failing for a whole platform, its access token may have been revoked, expired, or had its scopes changed on the provider's side. zcrypt can't push or pull chunks without a valid token.

• •Open Settings and check the platform's connection status.
• •Reconnect the platform with a fresh token that has the required scopes.
• •If you rotated the token on the provider (GitHub, GitLab, and so on), update it in zcrypt to match.

Token setup is covered in Bring your own storage.

The API limits how many requests an IP can make in a short window to keep the service healthy and to blunt brute-force attempts. Auth and public share/send links are limited more tightly. A burst of activity (or retrying too aggressively after a failure) can trip these limits.

• •Wait a short while, then retry: limits reset on a rolling window.
• •Avoid hammering retries in a tight loop; space them out.
• •On your own self-hosted instance behind a proxy, make sure the trusted-proxy setting is correct so legitimate traffic isn't grouped under one IP.