The nice thing about syncing services like Vaultwarden is that all your synced devices kind of act like backups. You should still keep proper backups too, of course, but this makes me sleep a bit better at night at least.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Yeah, this too... like... I have Bitwarden synced in different computers/phones, so at least most of the passwords will still be somewhere.
I use vaultwarden as my bitwarden backup. I pay for bitwarden premium because it's too critical of a service for me to not pay for access/support the service, or to expect my self hosted option will be sufficiently reliable enough.
That said, as a backup option, I run the vaultwarden addon in home assistant and just periodically do a manual export from bitwarden and import to vaultwarden. This is usually good enough for me, but glad to see this thread with some other options. Will be exploring some of these too!
Oooh, I like this idea... I've thought about running vaultwarden but like you I pay for bitwarden premium because I think it's critical for me and I like the service and want to see them continue. Using it as a backup, then I can still support them and run my own backup.
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I don't trust myself with Vaultwarden honestly. I will just pay for Bitwarden if I need to.
agree .... one of the services which is just to critical for me to selfhost
Same for email. I can't afford it to be down for days while I stress out about fixing whatever it was that I broke.
Actually on premise self hosting email is just stupid these days. I do have my domain email set up with a local provider, but I don't use it. Again, email is crucial and I don't trust myself
Same. Like, I'm relatively confident in the systems I have running, but not so confident that I'd trust them with my most important passwords.
I just periodically export my vault every few months, it's compatible with bitwarden. Absolute worst case scenario I can just sign up and import my vault, and maybe lose a password or 2,whoch can most likely just be reset anyways.
I've had decent success with using this image to handle my backups: vaultwarden-backup. You can configure rclone to target a variety of providers
Simple way to build confidence in your backups... test your restores regularly.
For backups, I have two storage VPSes (one in Los Angeles and one with a completely different provider in Canada), and have an individual backup to each one. I'm using Borgbackup for that.
Borg lets you enable an "append only" mode for particular clients such that even if an attacker were to gain access to your client system, they couldn't delete your backups. This is a common issue with rsync/rclone solutions.
Borg dedupes across all backups, so you can have months of daily backups without using a lot more disk space. Neither rsync nor rclone can do this.
Don't forget to test your backups by doing a data recovery run - act as if your data was lost, and try to set everything up again, maybe on a VM or something. If the backups aren't tested, you don't really have backups :)
I regularly hear it's great. Has anyone moved from KeePass? I haven't read anything that makes me think I should move on from KeePass. I have maybe ~4-5 clients and merging databases has been very easy since no client is offline for too long.
I went from KeePass to pass to vaultwarden. Sharing passwords is way easier.
I tried it but reverted back to KeePass. I didn't see any advantage with Vaultwarden and having it exposed so brazenly didn't fill me with confidence. When I tried to run in parallel I found that you can't sync vault warden with a keepass DB file. You can import it, but once it's imported you can't keep them in sync. Re-do an import and you end up with everything duplicated - but updated entries... which is the up to date one? If it had better syncing I could see myself using keepass on mobile and vaultwarden on PC. But at the end KeePass is just brilliant as it is and that's fine with me.
how are you doing your backups now? are you using the 3-2-1 backup strategy?
Not really, no. I have an HDD and an SSD both in a same machine. Data in SSD gets copied to HDD everyday. I don't have any remote backup yet. How do you do your remote backup?
encrypted Rsync to a free Backblaze account. be sure to test your backups tho
Wow thank you so much. Just found out about them.
Set up a Backblaze B2 account. Make regular backups via RSync (and use encryption.)
10GB free, and dirt cheap after that.
I do this, but on B2 I upload encrypted restic repo. Password manager backup is one of those instances where it's totally worth to have historical copies (for example, 1 weekly copy for the last 6 months), as it consumes very little space while saving the day in case of accidental overwrite or deletion.
I don't trust vaultwarden, only on the basis that it's unofficial and not as strictly audited. I use the container stack provided by bitwarden behind a cloudflare tunnel and backup the data directory with duplicati to S3. Should be able to do the same with vaultwarden, just try a backup test.
VW is FOSS, so that is not an issue. I trust them, but I don't trust myself
How do you approach remote access?
I run it through an nginx proxy that runs cloudflared through my domain, giving https access with limited worry of various security concerns. Probably not the best setup but was relatively easy to do.
Behind Zerotier. Although I'm thinking of just exposing it because honestly if you setup right you kinda don't have to worry about it that much.
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I don't run Vaultwarden because I don't trust myself, but Container -> Traefik -> dst-nat -> Cloudflare Proxy (don't use this for video).
I've been using it for a few months now and love it. I have it on 2 VMs. 1 at home and 1 on my dedicated server in the cloud.
I have a horribly written script that stops the vaultwarden container on the home VM, it copies the db.sqlite3 files to the VM in the cloud using SCP, copies everything inside the attachments folder using SCP and then starts the container again. I then have the same type of script on the cloud VM that stops the container, grabs the db and attachments from the temp folder and moves them to the correct directories and starts the container.
I only use the instance on the VM at home, the cloud VM is only used if something has happened to the VM at home. I do the same with my netbox instance.
I also don't expose anything to the internet. Everything is behind WireGuard. I have my phone setup with Tasker to automatically connect the tunnel when my phone disconnects from my home WiFi SSID.
I ran it for a while but ultimately didn’t trust myself to harden it enough.
Mine runs on a synology nas, and i have a hyperbackup task that copies the data volume up to gdrive every night (encrypted of course).
Also, any device you've synced to vaultwarden will retain the data even if the server is down, and with the addin for firefox for example, you can export that data out.
any device you’ve synced to vaultwarden will retain the data even if the server is down, and with the addin for firefox for example, you can export that data out.
Never knew that. Now I can sleep.
how about passbolt?
You may have just inspired me to do the same lol, I'm self hosting most of my other things.... For some reason, keeping my own data safe with bitwarden is kinda freaking me out too lol
TOTP function is what really made it happen. It brings me so much joy to have one, self hosted service to do everything login related compared to using Authy too. I was way too invested in Authy which was never comfortable for me. I now found peace.
Is having your passwords and TOTP in one place recommended? I would’ve thought that having both separate would be more secure.
It still defends against one failure mode (the website gets hacked but you're ok) but yeah, obviously if you get hacked and the hacker knows how to get your vault out then you're 100% screwed.
My suggestion is always hardware 2FA, even though it's not as mature as the other systems. Personally I have two Yubikeys (in case one breaks/gets lost) but it does mean that I need to add TOTPs to both of them each time I add a new 2FA.
I'm fairly certain hardware based 2fa has been around since the early 90s maybe even earlier. It's not the maturity that's the issue, as I'm fairly certain its significantly older than application based, but that it's extremely inconvenient for the user to have to buy a physical key and keep it safe
I don't mean that it's not old, I mean that it's still got some more room for improvement. Passkeys, for instance, are an attempt at improving the user experience.
That definitely is my concern but I think as long as I keep my master pw safe, which is ridiculously long, I'll be fine. I don't use my master pw anywhere else.
It is discouraged but with a very strong non-reused primary password for your home instance, you’d be hard pressed to have problems with hackers even if they dump your database. It’s still a better idea to use a hardware key but that’s understandably annoying to carry/use.
One thing you could do is setup a second vaultwarden instance running on a separate machine ideally on a separate network and keep only TOTP connections on it, with its own backups and storage. But that is probably just as annoying.
It’s still a better idea to use a hardware key
I'm looking forward to more sites supporting Webauthn / FIDO2 one day. Many companies are moving this way for internal systems, since TOTP is vulnerable to social engineering attacks (eg an attacker calls and says they're from IT support and need a TOTP code for security purposes).
You don't always need a hardware key though, I don't think. At my workplace we use Yubikeys with a certificate stored on them, but on my phone (Galaxy S22) I can use my fingerprint to authenticate. I don't know a lot about it.
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I tried Vault warden, but I didn't find it better than KeePass which I have syncing over nextcloud to storage that is mounted over NFS for my desktop and laptop. There are plenty of clients so you can use windows, linux, android etc.
I ran Keepass synced through my Nextcloud for a long time as well, but I switched to Vaultwarden after loosing Passwords due to sync issues. Almost got locked out of an important account. Luckily I noticed it early enough to recover it through my Nextcloud's versioning. But since then I'm too paranoid to rely on a password manager without a reliable syncing mechanism built-in if I'm gonna use it daily on a range of different devices.
This post reminded me to finally get around to fixing the error preventing me from setting up TOTP on my self hosted install.
I like to connect an external drive and make backups on it. If your Vaultwarden die, unless your devices are de-authorised (or try to update the URL), you can access the vault and export the data.
FIY even when deauthorized all passwords previously synced are still available but prevents syncing without fully logging in.
I really should give this a go again. I did run it for a little while, but switched to the paid hosted version as I want to have family tied into this and ultimately not be responsible if things go to hell. As long as I have decent redundancy / backup plans in place, it should be alright, though!
From what I understand of it your passwords and all should be save as it also stores them clientsided. So its more like your sync is down. But dont quote me on that
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