It never made sense to me to put password managers in the cloud. Regards to what you intend it to do, you’re making it accessible to a wider audience than necessary. And yet, I’m using iCloud. It’s time for a change.
I’m thinking of just running a locally hosted password manager on my home server and letting my devices sync with it somehow when I’m at home. I have a VPN into my home network when I’m away that automatically triggers when I leave the house, so even that’s not that big an issue, but I’m really not familiar with what’s gonna cleanly integrate with all my stuff and be easy to use. All I know is I wanna kill the cloud functionality of my setup.
I already have a jellyfish server so I figured I would just throw this onto that. Any suggestions?
Is the data super important to you?
Let someone else host it.
Bitwarden in the cloud.Edit: Bitwarden paying the monthly/yearly fee to BW. I wasn’t implying trying to host it yourself in the cloud.
Passwords are one I happily pay for someone else to worry about
That’s about my most valuable digital data
This. And to add to what other commenters have said, by using Bitwarden and paying for their Premium plan (very cheap, just $10/year), even if you don’t use all their features, you’re supporting a good project. It’s critical infrastructure, I think the price is more than fair.
Either way, you should always make periodic backups from any cloud service you use, encrypted of course.
Yes! Oh my, I’m silly; that was precisely my point and I managed to mess it up 🙃
Thank you for the correction!
Agreed. Unless your setup and security practices is flawless, I think passwords are better managed by specialists paid for it.
Your security will never be flawless. Human nature is to slip up every once and a while, and security is an ever evolving game of cat and mouse and even the professionals who spend their entire careers defending infrastructure are constantly playing catch-up.
I would never host my passwords locally because I know my security at home is nowhere near the security of a professional platform, especially one as trusted as Bitwarden. My dumb family photos and personal git repo? Sure. But Bitwarden holds passwords to my bank, government websites, work stuff, my credit cards, etc.
Waaay too much risk for me, and if anyone is looking at this i would recommend that you seriously consider what kind of liability you are really bringing on.
This is how I view password managers too, even though I have my home server backing up
+1 to this; Time spent on your setup is an important factor too.
The more important your data is, the more time you are going to need to spend maintaining your system to ensure security, backups and fail-overs. Not everyone has luxurious amount of time to spend on their home-lab everyday.
I did self-host bitwarden and it’s not that bad to keep updated and running after initial setup (including backups obviously) but it still requires some time and effort to keep it running. And as I was the only user for the service it just wasn’t worth the time spent for me (YMMV) so I switched to their EU servers and I’ve been a happy user ever since.
What I should do is to improve local backps on that, currently I just export my data every now and then manually to a secured storage, but doing it manually means that there’s often too long time between exports.