Hi everyone.

Given some recent… issues with Bitwarden’s leadership, I’ve been toying with Vaultwarden. It’s been great, and supports pretty much everything I need.

I currently locally host the vault, but I’m realizing that this could cause problems for my family if something were to happen to me. While not technologically inept, if my server at home crashed they would have no idea how to access it, and they would lose all of the passwords.

I was thinking that a vps might be a better choice for this, possibly with some reboot automation in case of outages. That would allow them enough time to initiate the emergency access and import everything before anything happens to the passwords.

I’ve also got encrypted M-disc backups of the most important passwords with timestamps of when they were last set. I’ve demonstrated and written down instructions on how to decrypt these. Of course I also have other backups, but I doubt they’d be able to retrieve the non-physical copies of the backups.

Anyway, is that what most people here do with Vaultwarden, use a VPS with mTLS or VPN? To add, I would only use a tunnel for this if I go this route, so no open ports.

  • thehatfox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    20 hours ago

    A VPS is going to have all the same problems as a local server in terms of inexperienced users, and will also add all the extra hassle of managing and paying for the VPS account.

    I would say the best options for emergency access are local backups and documentation, which you already have. You could also consider keeping additional copies of essential passwords (like email accounts etc) in a simpler vault like Keepass. Or even physical copies written down in a security envelope in a safe.

    • Creat@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2·
      15 hours ago

      A VPS is like 5 bucks. Which isn’t nothing but when used as a redundancy or place to send (reasonably sized) backups, it’s cheaper than most alternatives. It’s also still a form of “self hosting”, at least for me.

      Exporting, maybe on a schedule, to a keepass to keep somewhere, also works of course. But when hosting the only/main instance at home you’ll have at least one single point of failure, most likely many. Internet connection, server, network/switches, …