---
title: On Diaster Recovery
description: Stupid shutdowns and lucky lockouts
publishedDate: 2025-03-14
tags:
    - thoughts
    - short
    - sysadmin
---
One of the services I've self-hosted for the longest time has been [Vaultwarden](https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden), a Bitwarden-compatible password manager - CT logs show that there's been something at the domain it lives on [since February 2022](https://crt.sh/?q=bw.tdpain.net).[^1]

As of today, I'm no longer self-hosting it after a nasty situation where I nearly completely locked myself out of all my digital infrastructure. It turns out if that you accidentally shut down the wrong machine, the one that has your password manager hosted on it, and then cannot log back into your hosting provider to reboot it because your password to both your hosting provider and your email (to reset your password on the hosting provider) is stored on that machine, you're in for a bad time.

Luckily the data wasn't *gone* gone - I did manage to get back in to everything and reboot the machine - but it definitely wasn't easy to access and I was pretty much only saved by a cached local copy in a Bitwarden client.

So, this was a nice wake up call! Disaster recovery is important! I've known my posture here isn't great for a while, but this has finally motivated me to move away from a self-hosted password manager and find a third-party one that I trust and should be rock-solid stable. It's one thing out of a larger set of fairly important improvements that I'm going to be making to my disaster recovery plans now that I've actually been alerted to just how bad of a situation I'm in.

---

[^1]: Admittedly, no, 3 years is objectively not a huge amount of time, but that's right when I was really getting into this self-hosting business.