
Ask HN: What's your recovery plan after a major hardware loss? - kruuuder
Suppose that while you&#x27;re out for a run, your apartment burns down. Your PC&#x2F;Notebook is gone as well as your smartphone, all your external hard drives, your NAS, all kind of recovery codes you printed out on paper. (Alternative scenario: Your backpack with your notebook and smartphone gets stolen while you&#x27;re traveling abroad)<p>Which steps do you have to do in order to access<p><pre><code>  - your emails
  - your current project data
  - your personal backups (photos etc.)
  - control over your domains
</code></pre>
I noticed that since I use a password manager I don&#x27;t know any of my passwords. Also, many accounts are protected with 2FA, so to recover anything I have to drive 200 km to my parent&#x27;s house where I keep my offsite backup.<p>I&#x27;m trying to assess the risk of locking myself out of my data, and looking for ways to improve my backup concept.<p>What do you do? Could you go to the Apple Store, buy a new MacBook, then use a public WiFi to completely restore everything? Do you have a zipfile hosted somewhere, encrypted with a password you know, that contain the &quot;root keys&quot; you need?
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chris_mc
I just sync everything important (laptop, phone) to a couple of cloud
providers and an additional home server (so it's in 4-5 places) and figure
that at least one of those will be okay. Physical items are kept locked in my
desk at work inside a second locked container (U2F backup token, 2FA codes,
etc.) If I lost everything, it would suck, but it's happened before and I was
fine.

