What happens when I move to a new Mac?

Your licence moves. Your history does not. Both halves of that are worth understanding before you need them.

The licence is the easy part. Every tier allows two machines per developer, so a new Mac alongside your existing one is already covered. If you are replacing a machine rather than adding one, deactivate the old one from Settings and the slot frees up immediately.

Snapshot history is the awkward part. Snapshots are encrypted with a key generated on that specific machine, stored via Electron’s safeStorage and protected by your macOS Keychain, and Dotvault never uploads it anywhere for you.

What that means depends on how you move. If you use Migration Assistant to bring your whole user account across, your Keychain and Dotvault’s data directory come with it and your history survives the move. If you set the new Mac up fresh and reinstall — which is what most people do eventually — the key is not there, and the new machine starts with an empty History tab. Your actual .env files are untouched either way, because they are ordinary files in your project folders.

Stored keys for Laravel encrypted env files work the same way. They are scoped to the file’s location on that machine, so you will be asked for the key again on the new one. Keep those keys wherever you already keep them, which should not be Dotvault alone.

A portable encrypted backup is the obvious answer to this and I am considering it, but I would rather tell you the current state than describe something that does not exist yet.