ZINE #1 · SPRING 2026 · NOT FOR RESALE

Private
Archive

a small service for bytes that should be readable only by you

↑
so anyway here’s the deal:

— pg. 1 —

why we made this

most “encrypted” backup services know your name email card number IP address device fingerprint — basically everything except the contents of your files. and even those they sometimes still see, because the encryption is added on top of a credentialled session that already identifies you.

that’s not what we wanted to build. so we built a different thing.

private archive is a backup service that does not know who its customers are. you generate a certificate on your machine. you encrypt your files with restic. you send the ciphertext through tor. you pay in monero. that’s the whole product.

— pg. 2 —

the threat model

your isp watching the wire? tor.
us getting breached? attacker walks off with scrambled noise.
a future owner of this company changing the rules? there’s no plaintext for them to inherit.
a payment processor leaking your card? there isn’t one.
you losing your client cert? your archive is gone.
you losing your passphrase? your data is gone.

^^ those last two are features. a service that can recover your data is a service whose breach can recover it for someone else.

— pg. 3 —

how the bytes travel

        you                                   us
   .--------.       tor (3 hops)        .------------.
   | restic | =========== ⤳ =========== |  scrambled |
   |  encr  |                            |    noise   |
   '--------'                            '------------'
       ^                                       |
       |--------- you can pull bytes back any time ↩ ---------|

↑ restic encrypts the bits before they leave your laptop. we get scrambled noise. where we put the noise is, frankly, none of your business — and we couldn’t unscramble it for ourselves either way.

— pg. 4 —

how to actually use it

download the client — binaries listed on pg. 5.
run it. privatearchive init generates a certificate. keep it safe (and backed up — in a different place).
fund. privatearchive pay prints a monero subaddress. send some XMR. pay-as-you-go — top up, burn down, no subscription, no monthly anything.
back up. privatearchive backup ~/Documents. you can put this in cron.
forget. seriously, that’s the goal.

if any of that is unclear we have probably failed at our job. write us through the gitea issue tracker.

— pg. 5 —

grab the binaries

all builds reproducible from source. don’t trust us. compile.