Birch Sliver Support

It's your file after Birch Sliver has compressed and encrypted it — smaller, and locked. Only Birch Sliver can open it, and only with the passphrase you chose. Double-click a .sliver and it opens in the app, ready to unseal.

No — and neither can anyone else, including us. There is no reset and no recovery. Birch Sliver never sends your passphrase or your file anywhere, so we never have them and there's no backdoor to get in. A sealed file without its passphrase stays sealed, permanently. So please: keep your passphrase somewhere safe — a password manager is ideal — before you rely on it for anything you can't afford to lose.

No. Everything happens on your Mac. The app has no network access at all — no account, no cloud, no servers — so your files never leave your device. There's nowhere for them to go.

Open the .sliver file in Birch Sliver (double-clicking it works, or drag it into the window) and enter the passphrase you used to seal it. That's it — you get your original file back, exactly as it was.

Some files are already compressed — photos, video, music, and already-zipped archives, mostly. There's not much left to squeeze out of those, so they seal to about the same size (and they're still encrypted, which is the other half of the job). Birch Sliver never makes a file bigger than it needs to; if there's nothing to gain, it just says so.

A Mac running macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. That's the whole list — no other setup, no account, nothing to configure.

Birch Sliver is provided as-is. It's built carefully and we stand behind it, but encryption is serious business, so two friendly reminders: use a strong passphrase, and keep your own backups of anything you truly can't afford to lose. Since only you hold the passphrase, only you can get a sealed file back — that's the whole idea, and it's worth respecting.

The short version: the app collects nothing and your files never leave your Mac. The full story is on the Birch Sliver privacy page.