Hacker News Reader

Comment by nocoder | Hacker News Reader

What would be a good way to backup the passwords stored in Bitwarden? I am worried that someday suddenly bitwarden could stop working and I will lose access to all the stored passwords? Should I have a physical copy of all the passwords stored in a vault at home?

View on HN

The simplest way of doing this would be to export your bitwarden vault in plaintext (as a json or csv) and then store it as a password protected zip file.

This should be easy to encrypt and decrypt on all operating systems, and would make it easy to move your vault to a new password manager.

If you have some sort of home server, I'd recommend hosting vaultwarden (an open-source implementation of the BitWarden server). It works fine with the official apps. Their enterprise model requires a standard API, so it's not going to break anytime soon.

This does not take the need for separate backups way though. In fact, I'd argue it makes it even more important to maintain a 3-2-1 backup of your vault.

Running vaultwarden on a home server is one small disaster away from losing everything. Homelabs typically don't enjoy the same level of protections and redundancies compared to a commercial DC.

Use the export feature and just save the file somewhere safe, mine is in a Cryptomator vault. You could also import to Keepass and then delete the file.

Export your BE vault and import it into key pass. Then store that file somewhere safe.

I personally went (a year ago) to pass: https://www.passwordstore.org/.

It just creates a git repository that I can back up wherever I want.

Desktop: keepass variants.

Android: Keepass2 android.

Use syncthing to stay in sync.

How to use Syncthing on Android now that the app has gone?

There is a fork: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android

For this type of data, preference could be toward fully open source stack (i.e. fdroid, etc).

Another thing I recommend is to enable versioning on syncthing for the database. This way accidental changes can be reverted easily.

You can do JSON exports within the apps. But careful, all your passwords are unencrypted in the JSON.

Frankly I would worry about that with any third party that holds my data. There are a few Bitwarden exporters on Github that also account for attachments (something the builtin exporter doesn't for some reason).

BW synchronizes all your data on each client... if you logged in before, and your server goes down, you can still log in to a recent client, it just won't be able to update

you could recover from that

No way to export from the client though, so you would have to recover the server unless you previously made backups with the export feature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com