The journal that becomes a legacy.Voice. Video. Encrypted. Delivered.

A vault holds your documents. A journal holds you. The difference is what your family will be left with: a folder of policies and account numbers, or a record of who you actually were.

The most asked-for digital legacy is not a will, it is the things people wish they could still hear: a parent reading a bedtime story, a grandmother explaining her recipes, a mentor giving the advice they never got to finish. Voice and video, attached to dates, preserved in the same zero-knowledge envelope as the rest of your vault.

Critics of legacy platforms call them "storage-first, not human-first." That is a fair critique of any product that gives you a folder and walks away. Henedo's answer is a journal that takes 60 seconds at a time and accumulates, over years, into something unrepeatable.

Concrete examples from how people actually use it:

• A 60-second voice note recorded the week your daughter is born, scheduled to play on her 18th birthday.
• A 5-minute video walking through the family recipes, tagged for delivery to every grandchild.
• A weekly 30-second voice note while cooking dinner, "today I learned, today we did, today I felt." Two years of these is 100 entries. Your family hears 50 minutes of you they would otherwise never hear again.
• A bedtime-story recording you make once, played back every night you are travelling, and kept for the next generation.
• A business handoff video for your co-founder, encrypted, scheduled, and delivered only on the dead man's switch trigger.

The product does not write the script for you. The product writes nothing for you, by design. It gives you a calendar, a record button, and the cryptographic guarantee that what you record reaches who you intend.

Critics also call legacy platforms "a file dump for descendants." Henedo's contact-access and Eternal Vault pages render a chronological viewer, not a folder. The first thing an inheritor sees is your personal message (your introduction or final words). The second is the journal viewer, organized by date with media playback. The third is the file browser. Statistics, total photos, total voice minutes, total video minutes, are surfaced so they understand the scope.

The viewer plays your audio and video natively. It honours per-recipient routing, your spouse sees what you tagged for them; your child sees what you tagged for them.

Voice notes, videos, photos, and text entries are encrypted client-side using AES-256-GCM under a per-entry File Encryption Key (FEK), wrapped with your Master Key (MK), which is derived from your passphrase plus your device-bound Account Secret Key (ASK) via Argon2id (64 MB). The server stores ciphertext and metadata it cannot read.

The server cannot transcribe a voice note, generate captions for a video, or thumbnail a photo. There is no analytics layer, no ML pipeline, no admin override. See the full architecture on the security page.

Telling your spouse to "remember to give the kids my videos when I'm gone" is wishful delivery. Henedo's mechanism is engineered:

• Your designated contacts hold their decryption keys from the day you assign them, mailed as engraved metal NFC cards (Legacy/Eternal tier) or split across email + card.
• The platform refuses to serve ciphertext until the dead man's switch fires (180 days inactivity + 5-week warning cascade).
• When the switch fires, server flips a single boolean. Their pre-delivered keys can now decrypt the journal bundles.
• Underneath, the storage layer is actively preserved — geo-redundant primary storage refreshed every ~10 years onto current technology, with an optional M-Disc redundancy layer on top — so delivery does not depend on Henedo's email, servers, or even the company existing. Heirs can decrypt with the disc and the public crypto spec alone.

We are the only platform that combines all four. Read the portability page for the decrypt-without-Henedo recipe.

The journal is open-ended on purpose. If you want a more guided format, the Life Story ships 1,000 curated prompts across ten dimensions of a life, answerable with text, voice, or video and encrypted under the same master key. Most people use the journal for what is happening now and the Life Story for everything before now. They share the same vault, the same trusted contacts, and the same release rules.

What we do not ship today: AI-suggested chapter summaries, daily-streak gamification, on-device transcription. Those remain on the public roadmap. We surface what we ship and label the rest as roadmap.