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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • There’s a number of reasons. I would guess for most people here it’s really about control of their data, which is a form of privacy. Making sure it stays on their network (ie: in their control) unless they approve it to go somewhere else.

    There can be financial reasons (eg: backing up 10s or hundreds of terabytes to the cloud can get expensive), practical reasons (poor Internet access, especially internationally), latency/performance reasons (home automation). Sometimes you’ll also get better interoperability with selfhosted stuff since exporting data is usually trivial and there’s no walled garden lockin. And that’s not everything, just a few reasons I can think of off the top of my head.

    But you’re right that some of these are often not the case. It can easily become more expensive (depending on how you account for things), it’s definitely more work & it’s never as easy as “just install and app and create an account”.

    Finally we can’t forget that a not insignificant number of people here are aspiring (or actual) sys admins. This is a GREAT way to learn the trade if that’s your thing.






  • There’s two options that are popular, as you may have guessed from the comments.

    Vaultwarden is (my guess) the more popular one with a server & web interface managing your password database on that server.

    KeePass is a standalone tool that relies on a local database file. You’ll see other names like KeePassXC as that’s the Linux client, anything that’s roughly KeePass is all the same concept --and importantly, compatible with the same encrypted database file of passwords.

    It’s worth noting that Vaultwarden stores your passwords locally in case you can’t get to your server, and KeePass has very good built-in syncing over files. And since KeePass is just dealing with that file you can easily get it to your phone (or even in a browser) with something that does file sharing over the web like Nextcloud. Anything webdav or syncthing will work for sharing the file but Nextcloud has a great plugin to ALSO let you use the KeePass file directly in nextcloud web interface.

    Personally I use KeePass as I hadn’t heard of Vaultwarden when I started but with the file sync on save feature I have KeePass syncing to my NAS from both laptop & desktop. With NC I have it syncing to the web using the NC file/folder sync tool. With thr NC app I can use it on any browser. With the Android app I can sync the database from NC to my phone. I’ve got copies of the database everywhere and I can’t imagine losing it (exactly what I want with everything, but especially passwords).