
Ask HN: Personal Service Redundancy and Resilience - leoleoleoleo
Having a brief encounter with a temporarily-lost phone a while ago, wondering if anyone had any particular risk-based solutions to keeping access to their online services going?<p>I&#x27;ve been doing little tabletop simulations to try pre-empt issues. Such as; lost phone, hospitalisation&#x2F;death, broken storage, etc. A phone, in Google or Apples ecosystem, can really be a huge single point of failure.<p>Some of mine;<p>- Domain (prompted by EURid&#x27;s Brexit b&#x2F;s). I foresee no realistic technological solution here. Most of my mail comes in via catchall from different domains, which reduces the risk as it can be repointed. But what about primary domain? Just hope people know an alternative ala TPB? Best reduction seems to be hosting with a reputable provider, on a good TLD, with respected arbitration. Then just accept the remaining risk :(.<p>- Gmail (loss of account&#x2F;access). Here I am thinking about mirroring mail (via mailgun) to a selfhosted box. Then it would just be simply logging in at a different portal. Other users would be up shit creek for a bit.<p>- Phone (lots of 2FA soft token nonsense and phone-binded apps). I imagine prompt recovery to another device is the best bet. But what if you can&#x27;t? At least my number, and SMS can both be accessed outside the device as I VOIPed everything. So recovery isn&#x27;t as painful as it could be. I am thinking Android in a VM _might_ work with banking, but probably not. I think the biggest issues here are 2FA recovery.<p>- Passwords&#x2F;files. Mainly for my own incapacitation. Here I have done something a little simpler. I created a keyfile, gave one half to my partner and one to a friend. If access is needed, they will both need to collude for access and hope any service they need remains online long enough.<p>What is your important stuff, and what do you do to mitigate the risk of loss and similar events?
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moviuro
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.

[0] [https://try.popho.be/securing-home.html#data-
protection](https://try.popho.be/securing-home.html#data-protection)

[1] [https://www.passwordstore.org/](https://www.passwordstore.org/)

[2] [https://www.google.com/android/find](https://www.google.com/android/find)

