Comment by saalweachter
9 hours ago
The smarter thing to do is to just wipe your phone of everything you don't want border patrol to see before going to an airport.
9 hours ago
The smarter thing to do is to just wipe your phone of everything you don't want border patrol to see before going to an airport.
With self-hosting, it's possible to easily bootstrap a clean phone with all your data and passwords from scratch, without relying on any third-party cloud services. The only thing you need to bring across the border is your brain (which contains the most basic information on how to set up your password manager) and maybe some kind of 2FA generator. Your password manager then contains all the other information you need to get everything running.
I don't think it ever makes sense to transport actual data across borders if you care about governments gaining access to it.
Possible, yes. Easy, not so much. Phone operating systems don't really place nice with local backup and restore, which I consider a serious flaw.
I'm not sure what you're referring to, but what I basically do is self-host everything that stores relevant data: Vaultwarden, Immich, Notesnook, etc. I only know how to set up Bitwarden and my 2FA generator from scratch, so when I get a new phone, I install Bitwarden and the 2FA app and set them up.
Then everything else is documented inside Bitwarden. It's just a matter of installing the apps and logging in using the credentials stored in Bitwarden and a 2FA token generator.
There's no need for relying on any phone OS features.
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