If your phone falls in a lake, is stolen, is confiscated, is lost or just glitches and dies, can you rebuild your life and access your accounts?
Can you get into your email and bank accounts without access to the 2fa/mfa in your phone? Your contacts and phone numbers?
Will all your photos be lost?
Write down all the apps, websites and services you need to be able to access. Now put your phone in a drawer and try to use them all.
If there are any that you cannot get into, find out how to do it now, before the boogie man disappears your phone.
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2fa is just linked to your phone number too. Assuming you could afford a phone, couldn’t you just get a new one to replace the one you misplaced?
A similar exercise:
Open a web browser that you don’t use often or ever. Firefox, or Edge, or Chrome, or Opera, whatever. Clear cookies and history.
Then, make sure you can log in to all of your important web sites.
You will find out very quickly if you don’t have the correct password for some site, and you can go back to your main browser and change the password.
I know people who have been logged in to Facebook for ages but then they get logged out somehow, and it won’t take their password to log back in again, because they changed it at some point and didn’t update it in their password manager.
What’s the fix for all the 2FA that is linked to my phone number? I can’t even get into my email account without that.
Isn’t the cloud for this? It would back up the entire phone.
I go through this process every time I upgrade my phone and set up a new one via cloud backup
Confiscated? I got bigger problems if I’m in a phone confiscated situation.
It’s called : the cloud
This isn’t a tip. It’s called life.
This goes 10x as companies try to get people to adopt passkeys. Passkeys are your physical device. I’m still more comfortable with password + non-phone 2FA + cloud backups.
I traveled overseas late last year and this was a real exercise as I took an alternate phone. It’s really fun to try to get into bank accounts on a different phone and have to ensure you have the new number and emails linked up.
Now I have multiple emails, multiple computers, and multiple ways to get into each account.
I’ve lost my phone wallet more than once traveling, so now in addition phone numbers of close friends and family, I have my main email, license branch info and DL number, banking info, and a couple of cards memorized. But you gotta make sure you test yourself often. It saved my ass not too long ago.
Ya, i just use bitwarden its amazing. Back up all my other shit to the cloud.
Contacts: backed up on google contacts on the go
Phone: backed up on google every 24 hrs, with all apps. You may lose home screen layout though.
You need sim replacement from the phone company to start 2fa.
All passwords: backed up on keychain/ chrome/ written down
Wapp: backed up on google every week without videos
Photos: backed up on onedrive/ google photos on the go
Files: backed up on Dropbox
Phone is just a monitor, should be a monitor, cloud is your saviour.
The only password I need to know is my email. Anything can be reset with it 🙂↕️
Bitwarden for 2FA. Avoid SMS and Email Codes like the devil. Every time you want to access something vitally important, the codes just don’t arrive. TOTP codes are always available.