I’m going to move away from lastpass because the user experience is pretty fucking shit. I was going to look at 1pass as I use it a lot at work and so know it. However I have heard a lot of praise for BitWarden and VaultWarden on here and so probably going to try them out first.
My questions are to those of you who self-host, firstly: why?
And how do you mitigate the risk of your internet going down at home and blocking your access while away?
BitWarden’s paid tier is only $10 a year which I’m happy to pay to support a decent service, but im curious about the benefits of the above. I already run syncthing on a pi so adding a password manager wouldn’t need any additional hardware.
This was also the most compelling reason for me to consider it.
I do think that balanced against the time and effort and risk of me fucking up outweighs this benefit. But I can totally see why for some that balance goes the other way.
I think the main thing for not messing it up is just make sure you keep it updated. Probably set up auto updates and auto backups.
More than any other piece of self-hosted software: backups are important if you’re going to host a password manager.
I have Borg automatically backing up most of the data on my server, but around once every 3 months or so, I take a backup of Vaultwardens data and put it on an external drive.
As long as you can keep up with that, or a similar process; there’s little concern to me about screwing things up. I’m constantly making tweaks and changes to my server setup, but, should I royally fuck up and say, corrupt all my data somehow: I’ve got a separate backup of the absolutely critical stuff and can easily rebuild.
But, even with the server destroyed and all backups lost, as long as you still have a device that’s previously logged into your password manager; you can unlock it and export the passwords to manually recover.