The sandglass conjecture, posed by Simonyi, states that if a pair $(A, B)$ of families of subsets of $[n]$ is recovering then $|A| |B| \leq 2^n$. We improve the best known upper bound to $|A| |B| \leq 2.2543^n$. To do this we overcome a significant barrier by exponentially separating the upper bounds on recovering pairs from cancellative pairs, a related notion.