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.
I was recently debugging one issue on my server and vaultwarden became inaccessible for a couple of hours. During that time, I was logged out and could not log back in using bitwarden’s firefox extension. It was reporting an “unexpected error” because it couldn’t reach the server. So is this really true?
Is there a workaround that would allow me to unlock the database even if the server is down?
I was wrong to think that, I tested bitwarden Android client in airplane mode and it worked, but I didn’t realize that had a “signed-in” state separate from unlocking the vault with the password.