How it works
Cairn keeps your estate on your own computer. Apart from an update check you ask for, the only thing it talks to is our licence service — to activate and check your licence and manage estate slots.
What we hold, and what we never see
What the licence service holds
- Your email address
- The sign-in service you use and the account identifier it gives us
- A sign-in session while you're signed in
- A scrambled (hashed) copy of your licence key
- A code derived from your computer's name, never the name itself
- For each estate given a perpetual slot, its random identifier, never its name or contents
- Your IP address, in server logs kept for up to 30 days
What never leaves your computer
- Estates
- Assets
- Accounts
- Saved account passwords
- Contacts
- Beneficiaries
- Bills
- Debts
- Distributions
- Funeral wishes
- Checklists
- Attached files
- Usage statistics
- Crash reports
Cairn sends your licence key itself only when you activate it or move it to another computer; the service keeps only the scrambled copy. It also keeps the records that make a licence work — its type and status, your estate slots, and when each computer was activated and last checked in. The sign-in service, its account identifier and the sign-in session come from signing in on this website to manage your licence, not from Cairn itself. The privacy policy lists all of it, and how long each is kept.
Where your estate information lives
Everything you enter, attached files included, is stored in Cairn's own folder on your computer, along with its automatic restore points and its error log. We never receive any of it, and Cairn has no way to send it to us.
Stored account passwords can be encrypted with a passphrase only you know. We never receive that passphrase or its recovery code, so passwords protected by them cannot be recovered if both are lost.
When Cairn goes online
Cairn checks your licence from time to time and works offline in between. If it cannot reach the licence service for more than 45 days on a perpetual licence, or 30 days on a subscription, everything stays readable and exportable — only editing stops. Cairn is read-only until it can check in again.
It checks for updates only when you ask it to, and installs one only when you choose.
Restore points and exports
Your computer holds the only copy of your estate information, so Cairn gives you two kinds of protection, for two different problems.
- Restore points
- Kept automatically on the same computer. They help if Cairn's database is damaged, but not if the computer itself is lost, broken or stolen.
- Exports
- A copy of your estate information that you save somewhere other than that computer. It covers a computer that is lost, broken or stolen, which restore points cannot.