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Backup my way

First thing first, I want to list my own devices, which I have through the years:

App/Service I use daily:

The purpose is that I want my data to be safe, secure, and can be easily recovered if I lost some devices; or in the worst situation, I lost all. Because you know, it is hard to guess what is waiting for us in the future.

There are 2 sections which I want to share, the first is How to backup, the second is Recover strategy.

How to backup

Before I talk about backup, I want to talk about data. In specifically, which data should I backup?

I use Arch Linux and macOS, primarily work in the terminal so I have too many dotfiles, for example, ~/.config/nvim/init.lua. Each time I reinstall Arch Linux (I like it a lot), I need to reconfigure all the settings, and it is time-consuming.

So for the DE and UI settings, I keep it as default as possible, unless it's getting in my way, I leave the default setting there and forget about it. The others are dotfiles, which I write my own dotfiles tool to backup and reconfigure easily and quickly. Also, I know that installing Arch Linux is not easy, despite I install it too many times (Like thousand times since I was in high school). Not because it is hard, but as life goes on, the official install guide keeps getting new update and covering too many cases for my own personal use, so I write my own guide to quickly capture what I need to do. I back up all my dotfiles in GitHub and GitLab as I trust them both. Also as I travel the Internet, I discover Codeberg, Treehouse and use them as another backup for git repo.

So that is my dotfiles, for my regular data, like Wallpaper or Books, Images, I use Google Drive (Actually I pay for it). But the step: open the webpage, click the upload button and choose files seems boring and time-consuming. So I use Rclone, it supports Google Drive, One Drive and many providers but I only use Google Drive for now. The commands are simple:

# Sync from local to remote
rclone sync MyBooks remote:MyBooks -P --exclude .DS_Store

# Sync from remote to local
rclone sync remote:MyBooks MyBooks -P --exclude .DS_Store

Before you use Rclone to sync to Google Drive, you should read Google Drive rclone configuration first.

For private data, I use restic which use Rclone as backend:

# Init
restic -r rclone:remote:PrivateData init

# Backup
restic -r rclone:remote:PrivateData backup PrivateData

# Cleanup old backups
restic -r rclone:remote:PrivateData forget --keep-last 1 --prune

# Restore
restic -r rclone:remote:PrivateData restore latest --target ~

The next data is my passwords and my OTPs. These are the things which I'm scare to lose the most. First thing first, I enable 2-Step Verification for all of my important accounts, should use both OTP and phone method.

I use Bitwarden for passwords (That is a long story, coming from Google Password manager to Firefox Lockwise and then settle down with Bitwarden) and Aegis for OTPs. The reason I choose Aegis, not Authy (I use Authy for so long but Aegis is definitely better) is because Aegis allows me to extract all the OTPs to a single file (Can be encrypted), which I use to transfer or backup easily.

As long as Bitwarden provides free passwords stored, I use all of its apps, extensions so that I can easily sync passwords between laptops and phones. The thing I need to remember is the master password of Bitwarden in my head.

With Aegis, I export the data, then sync it to Google Drive, also store it locally in my phone.

The main problem here is the OTP, I can not store all of my OTPs in the cloud completely. Because if I want to access my OTPs in the cloud, I should log in, and then input my OTP, this is a circle, my friends.

Recovery strategy

There are many strategies that I process to react as if something strange is happening to my devices.

  • If I lost my laptops, single laptop or all, do not panic as long as I have my phones. The OTPs are in there, the passwords are in Bitwarden cloud, other data is in Google Drive so nothing is lost here.
  • If I lost my phone, but not my laptops, I use the OTPs which are stored locally in my laptops.
  • In the worst situation, I lost everything, my laptops, my phone. The first step is to recover my SIM, then log in to Google account using the password and SMS OTP. After that, log in to Bitwarden account using the master password and OTP from Gmail, which I open previously.

Misc

To backup everything is hard, so keep it simple and only backup important things. Pick one then stay away from other cloud services:

  • TODOis, Evernote, ... -> Google Keep/Notion
  • Dropbox, OneDrive, ... -> Google Drive

TODO

  • Backup Notion data then stores it in GitHub/GitLab/Goolge Drive.
  • Convert as many as GMail accounts as possible to SimpleLogin/Proton Mail.

The end

This guide will be updated regularly I promise.