Comment by SoftTalker
9 hours ago
All of those things are possibilities with any phone. If you're not prepared for the loss/damage/failure of your phone that's on you.
9 hours ago
All of those things are possibilities with any phone. If you're not prepared for the loss/damage/failure of your phone that's on you.
Definitely a good idea to plan on this at all times. In my case this looks like:
* All photos auto upload to Google photos
* All other important files are in a syncthing folder with at least two other devices (laptop+desktop)
* 2fa in Authy with cloud-sync
* Passwords on Firefox sync
* Google Fi is my carrier, and pulls eSIM when I log in to the app even without my old phone
* Google voice number is my main phone number. I don't lose access to incoming or outgoing sms or voice calls if I lose my phone.
In a pinch, I can buy a cheap prepaid phone and sim while traveling and be fully functional and reachable. I've had to do this before, and while I probably wouldn't go to the trouble for work, I feel compelled to be at least reachable for family.
I've thought about de-googling this further; photos could go straight into syncthing and I could port my # to a generic SIP provider that offers SMS. So far neither have seemed quite worth the trouble.
I've always felt very uncomfortable treating my phone as anything other than a rather overpowered thin-client.
Yubikeys can store 2fa codes. You just install their app from F-Droid and show the NFC key to get the codes.
Now the codes are with you and not in your phone or in the cloud.
One flaw in that is that Google Voice or other VOIP provider numbers are often rejected for 2FA or account validation.
Sometimes, yes, but not that often IME. Maybe 10-15% of the time.
I recommend you get off Authy - they don't have a browser extension or a desktop client, and surprise they don't have a way to export your codes either. I had to send them a GDPR data request, and then Claude decrypted the csv file they sent. I now use Ente and it's so nice having 2fa inside a browser extension. I can also export the secrets at will.
Keepass is also a good alternative to Authy, caveat being you need some way to sync the db file between devices.
I personally use Keepass for 2FA, Bitwarden for passwords. It's worked great for me so far, and I expect to stay with this setup for the foreseeable future.
Yes but I don't want my phone to be lost or destroyed or stolen. So using a phone that will likely fail until it does so is not taking preventative measures.
They are stronger possibilities once you know they are going to happen eventually, not just that they could theoretically happen.