The Manual
A handbook, kept short.
Elba is meant to be obvious after ten minutes. This is the ten minutes.
Download the full handbook
The long version — the one that reads like a friend at the kitchen table. Three formats. Keep one by the machine.
1 · Opening the program
The short way: open Elba.html in Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Brave. The nicer way: double-click Elba.command on macOS or Linux, or Elba.bat on Windows, and Elba opens in its own clean window without an address bar or tabs, like a small desktop program.
2 · Claiming a folder
Press Claim a folder and choose one. Elba draws its fence around that folder and asks you for a password. Choose a strong passphrase — four or five random words (like copper thistle lantern ferry) are stronger, and easier to remember, than a short tangle of symbols.
3 · Rooms, notes, files
Inside, press + note to write, + file to bring something in, or + room to nest a new space. Rooms can hold rooms; there is no fixed shape.
4 · The grey island
Everything is sealed and grey at rest. Open one item and it turns to colour. Close it and it goes grey again. At any moment, exactly one thing is legible on your screen.
5 · Locking
Press Lock when you leave. Elba also locks itself if you wander off, without losing your work.
6 · Backups
Your fence is a folder of sealed files. Copy it to a USB stick, to the cloud, anywhere. Whoever stores it can't read it. A fence with no copies is a sovereign territory of exactly one bad day.
7 · Where the fence ends
Elba keeps your files from being read by anyone without your password. It does not stop someone who can write to your folder from deleting or rolling back files — keep backups. It cannot protect what you have open on screen from a compromised browser or extension — keep your browser clean. It hides your files, their names, and your rooms, but the number of files and the timing of changes still show, faintly, from outside.
8 · The one warning that matters
There is no back door, no reset link, and no one — including us — who can recover your password for you. If you lose it, what's inside your fence is gone. This is not a flaw. It is the exact reason no one else can get in either. Write it down somewhere safe and offline.