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Ask HN: What's your recovery plan after a major hardware loss?
Suppose that while you're out for a run, your apartment burns down. Your PC/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're traveling abroad)
Which steps do you have to do in order to access
- your emails
- your current project data
- your personal backups (photos etc.)
- control over your domains
I noticed that since I use a password manager I don'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's house where I keep my offsite backup.
I'm trying to assess the risk of locking myself out of my data, and looking for ways to improve my backup concept.
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 "root keys" you need?
- chris_mc 8y agoI 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.