My suggestion was one of the convenient tips of the proverbial iceberg in the world of backups and redundancies. Today, I'd be astonished if one lost their devices and loses any data along with it.
Personally, all my devices are endpoints or tools. For instance, if I lost my phone, it will take me a few hours or a day/two at best to get back to where I was. The same goes for my other devices (desktops, laptops).
In the most critical situation, say, I lost my phone while traveling, but lucky my wife's phone is in-tact, I can pick up hers and go through my contacts (we sync our contacts two ways). I can then login to anything anywhere by getting to her Password Manager, which fortunately has a copy of mine. I might need to ask her to authenticate it for me.
I strongly feel that one should have a pattern and system of redundancies and be independent of the devices one uses. I'm still discovering and learning a lot; not yet the best, but I'm happy I started quite a while back.
Agreed. I also use my phone as an important part of my backup for my computer, which I'm willing to mess with more.
Specifically my phone has my password manager 1password:
- If I wanted to restore my computer from a disk backup I'd need the backup encryption key.
- If I wanted to recover my computer from a fresh install I'd need my GitHub password, Google Drive password (I sync my Documents folder to drive), email password, etc.
I have paper backups of my 1Password account recovery information but I wouldn't necessarily have those accessible while traveling. And I consider my phone to be the primary and most reliable of those.
(I'd really like a backup of my 1password but they don't make that trivial so it's on my to do list. At least each of their apps on my devices acts as an offline backup. I think that I can copy the SQLite database and the exact version of the app on my computer to a usb drive but that's obviously something I'd want to test)
There are also lots of little annoyances you don't necessarily think of. If you break your computer's network stack it's really annoying to debug without a way to Google, for example. I could borrow my partner's laptop for a quick check, but I'd rather not for an extended session.
I meant you have to have more than one device so there's a backup, or else rely on alternative means to recover. Not that every service needs its own device.
And if one needs a backup device then one must also register both with every new service.
I started writing a bit about data redundancy [0] (in particular : password files thanks to pass(1)[1], and other taxes).
For mail, I'm betting that GMail will stay up long enough (+ I have a full IMAP copy on my machines). My 2FA recovery tokens are synced across machines, see [0]. Pictures' storage goes to Google Photos + my own Nextcloud. Contacts are synced on my Google account: if I lose my phone, I can still use someone else's to warn my contacts. There are also things like Find my Device [2]. I don't have anything Android-exclusive, banking in particular works on my desktop and laptop.
For death/whatever, my parents know whom to contact (employer, bank, etc.). I also share photos, documents, etc. with whomever it might interest, so nothing should ever be lost if it was meant to be shared.
The thing is, a lot of people own more than one device.
Even more people know a couple of people who have devices with some spare space.
Wouldn't it be great if we had a way that people could "join" trusted devices to create mutual background backups. So I could pair my laptop with my phone, and each would back up "essential" data for the other. But I could also pair my phone with my significant other, and our phones would also work as backups of each other. Syncing could be done on some kind of schedule, maybe when they're in bluetooth range, or maybe if they find each other on the same LAN. Or maybe they could use cloud storage to transfer E2E encrypted blobs.
(i.e. my phone would backup my laptop and my parter's phone, my partner's phone would back up my phone, and my laptop would also back up my phone. If my partner wanted/was willing to also back up my laptop, that would be a separate step, and they would back up each other.)
Deciding which data should be considered "essential" is left as an exercise for the implementor :-)
The problem with that vision is that people break/lose phones a lot more often than laptops. We tend to carry your phone all the time with us, that leads to it being potentially exposed to way more dangers than our laptops. What happens to all your stuff when your phone is stolen in a pub? or when it fall into that subway gap?
If the answer to this is: it is all backed up automatically into the cloud and your new device will become a clone of your lost device, then you don't need the device in the first place, all you need is a terminal.
If the answer is: you're screwed, then maybe storing all your stuff on a device small enough to be easily stolen/broken was a bad idea.
Close shave! Be sure your cloud backups can be accessed by you even in the case of loss of all/most computing devices in your possession. This includes your phone for 2FA.
i am very serious. people lose their devices all the time.
never save important data on a single device. you simply delay the inevitable "i lost my data" scenario.
non-important data on the other hand should have no problems living on a single device. or even localstorage.
and as i said before, i don't think your average user has any ideas about backing up. that's why it almost always comes back to the developers to implement it.
> If the answer to this is: it is all backed up automatically into the cloud and your new device will become a clone of your lost device, then you don't need the device in the first place, all you need is a terminal.
Why do I only need a terminal if my data is backed up to the cloud, exactly? If I wish to watch a video that I downloaded to my phone, I can do that without having connection to the internet. If I wish to edit a photo with an application on my phone, all the processing of that file can be done locally on the device. Having a cloud backup of a device does not mean that there's no value in having a device with its own capabilities outside of the cloud.
> If the answer is: you're screwed, then maybe storing all your stuff on a device small enough to be easily stolen/broken was a bad idea.
For any valuable data you should have more than one backup solution, including data you store on your phone. Just because there's more risk of losing your phone than your desktop pc in your home doesn't mean that you take less measures to mitigate the chance of data loss on your desktop pc.
uh yeah with the word _Emergency_. RDF? - I don't even own a Mac or an iPhone. I would have made the same comment if "iPhone" was replaced with any other phone.
Obviously, I would highly recommend having a better backup solution in place, but if shit hits the fan and you have to connect to computer A to remote location server B, this seems like an OK option. Do you have any other ideas? Please share - can't have too many backup plans :).
Yet that same phenomenon means that losing your phone feels like losing all the objects tracked by your phone. I agree that this can be done well if we try but it should also be so resilient that you can be on a new phone with the same applications, data and settings in just a few minutes.
My fear is that your phone is also the primary MFA device, so losing that could mean you can't log into your account anymore (and therefore can't restore the cloud backup)…
>if you're traveling, backup your phone online, wipe it, and then carry it with minimal personal information
It would be nice if phone vendors provided a mechanism to backup my phone, wipe it, then some time later merge the backup with the contents of the phone. Would be nice to be able to leave the primary contents of my phone at home while a travel and then merge my travel photos and messages and such back in when I restore my original contents after returning home.
Wanting smartphone providers to provide less cloud backups is an interesting suggestion, considering I usually hear the exact opposite. Usually in the context of travelers being forced to give up their phone password at the airport there are suggestions that people wipe their phone before leaving then restore after arriving. Then there are complaints that current smartphones make this too difficult.
Personally, all my devices are endpoints or tools. For instance, if I lost my phone, it will take me a few hours or a day/two at best to get back to where I was. The same goes for my other devices (desktops, laptops).
In the most critical situation, say, I lost my phone while traveling, but lucky my wife's phone is in-tact, I can pick up hers and go through my contacts (we sync our contacts two ways). I can then login to anything anywhere by getting to her Password Manager, which fortunately has a copy of mine. I might need to ask her to authenticate it for me.
I strongly feel that one should have a pattern and system of redundancies and be independent of the devices one uses. I'm still discovering and learning a lot; not yet the best, but I'm happy I started quite a while back.
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