Back up your phone
to a USB drive. Offline.
Save photos, videos, albums, files, and documents straight to a connected USB drive. No cloud upload. No subscription. No internet required.
01 · How it works
Three steps. No account. No upload.
Plug your USB drive into your phone, pick what to back up, tap go. That's the whole flow — your files travel over the cable, not the internet.
Plug in a USB drive
Use USB-C, Lightning, or any standard USB drive with the right adapter for your phone. Your phone detects the drive instantly.
Pick what to back up
Photos, videos, albums, documents, or specific files. Preview before you commit. VaultDrive remembers your selection for next time.
Watch the progress bar
Files copy directly to the drive over the cable. Nothing leaves your phone except over USB. Resume safely if you unplug mid-transfer.
02 · Where it shines
Use cases that don't fit cloud backup.
Cloud backup is great until it isn't — when your storage's full, your internet's flaky, or your data is too sensitive to send anywhere.
Free up phone storage on the road
Dump 50 GB of vacation photos to a drive on the plane home. No Wi-Fi. No iCloud upgrade.
Wedding & event photographers
Offload a day's shoot to a drive between sessions — without burning hotel Wi-Fi or risking a stuck upload.
Sensitive documents
Medical records, legal scans, journals. Some files shouldn't touch the cloud. Keep them on a drive you control.
Field work, off-grid trips
Hiking, sailing, remote villages. Drives don't need signal. Back up daily even with zero bars.
Switching phones
Drop everything to a drive from your old phone, plug it into the new one, restore. No proprietary cable dance.
True archival
SD cards or SSDs sitting on a shelf cost less than cloud subscriptions and outlast any vendor's "lifetime" plan.
03 · Why VaultDrive
Compared to cloud backup services.
Cloud backup has its place. So does keeping your files on hardware you can hold. Here's how they differ.
| VaultDrive Best value | iCloud | Google One | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $0 | $2.99 – $59.99 | $1.99 – $99.99 |
| Works offline | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Capacity | Limited only by your drive | Up to 12 TB (paid) | Up to 30 TB (paid) |
| Data leaves device | Never | Uploaded | Uploaded |
| Account required | No | Apple ID | Google account |
| Files yours forever | ✓ (on your drive) | Until you stop paying | Until you stop paying |
04 · The details
Everything VaultDrive does.
Photos & videos
Full-resolution camera roll, including HEIC and ProRes. Original timestamps and metadata preserved.
Albums & folders
VaultDrive recreates your album structure on the drive as folders, so your organization survives the backup.
Documents & files
Back up files from your phone's Files app — PDFs, scans, spreadsheets, anything you've saved locally.
Safe to unplug
Files write atomically. Yank the drive mid-transfer and the next session resumes from exactly where you stopped.
Smart deduplication
Re-backup the same drive and VaultDrive skips files it already has. Saves drive space and minutes.
Restore to any device
Plug the drive back into the same — or a different — phone. Pick what to restore. Files come back intact.
Optional encryption
Choose to encrypt your drive's contents with a passphrase only you know. We never see it.
Zero telemetry
VaultDrive doesn't analyze your files, count them, or report what you back up. Local stays local.
05 · Pricing
Free to download. Yours forever.
VaultDrive is free on iOS and Android. The only thing you need is a USB drive you already own — or one you'll keep for decades.
on iOS and Android · forever
- Unlimited backups to any USB drive
- Photos, videos, documents, and albums
- Smart deduplication and resume
- Optional passphrase encryption
- Works fully offline
- No account required
06 · FAQ
Common questions.
Any standard USB drive. On iPhone use a Lightning or USB-C drive (depending on your model); on Android use a USB-C drive or a USB-A drive with an OTG adapter. Drives formatted as APFS, exFAT, or FAT32 work out of the box.
No. VaultDrive transfers files directly between your phone and the connected USB drive over the cable. Nothing is sent to our servers or any cloud service.
Yes. Plug the drive into your new phone, open VaultDrive, and pick what to restore. Photos and videos restore to the photo library; documents restore to the Files app.
Optionally. If you turn on encryption, VaultDrive uses AES-256 with a passphrase you set. Without the passphrase, your data on the drive is unreadable — so don't lose it.
Each file is written atomically — either the whole file makes it or it doesn't. When you reconnect, VaultDrive resumes from where it stopped and skips files already copied.
Free to download and use, with no subscription. You provide your own USB drive (any capacity).
Yes. VaultDrive lets you select individual albums, date ranges, file types, or specific files. The next time you back up to the same drive, only new or changed files are copied.
Your phone is full again.
It doesn't have to be.
Free · no account · works without internet