# Vigilans — About

Vigilans is a Mac backup app: it lives in your menu bar, encrypts your files on your machine, and stores them in an EU object-storage bucket that belongs to you. It is built and run by one person in Vienna, Austria — not by a company with a growth target.

## Who makes Vigilans

Vigilans is developed by Hannes Stiebitzhofer, a software engineer based in Vienna, operating as a sole proprietor. There is no investor, no board, and no acquisition plan — which is why the product is sold once rather than rented monthly. The legal operator details are published in full in the Impressum.

## Why it exists

Backup software tends to fail in one of two ways: it is either so quiet that you never learn it stopped working, or so noisy that you turn it off. Vigilans is built around the opposite promise — it checks that your backups are actually restorable, and it only interrupts you when something genuinely needs a decision.

The second reason is ownership. Most consumer backup services keep your data on their infrastructure, in their format, on their terms. Vigilans backs up to a bucket you create and pay for directly, in a format that outlives us.

## How it is built

The app is native macOS, written in Swift, and stores data as a standard restic repository. That last point matters more than it sounds: restic is free, open-source, cross-platform software, so everything Vigilans writes can be listed, verified, and restored with the restic command line — with or without a Vigilans license, forever.

- Encryption happens on your Mac; the password stays in your Keychain and never leaves the machine.
- Storage is Scaleway object storage in the EU (Paris, Amsterdam, or Warsaw), in a bucket you own.
- No telemetry, no analytics, and no account with us — the app talks to your bucket and to an update check.
- The app and this site are fully localized in English and German.

## Where things stand

Vigilans is in late development and has not launched yet. It will be a one-time purchase with a perpetual license — final pricing is not published because it is not decided. Storage is billed by Scaleway directly, typically a few cents per gigabyte per month.

If you want to know when it ships, or you have a question the FAQ does not answer, write to [contact@vigilans.app](mailto:contact@vigilans.app).

## Related pages

- [Contact](https://vigilans.app/en/contact)
- [Privacy Policy](https://vigilans.app/en/privacy)
- [Impressum](https://vigilans.app/en/impressum)
- [Terms of Service](https://vigilans.app/en/terms)

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https://vigilans.app/en/about