So I have an admission here: I keep seeing HN stuff about these networked password managers and I don't quite understand the appeal.
Is it because everybody else is swapping between several different computers, and you need the synchronization?
I just have everything in KeepassXC, and the ciphertext is subject to the same kind of backup regime I use for other files, [edit: and also additionally] a copy kept on a USB stick in my pocket.
It’s phones, mainly. People do also have multiple other devices, yes. For me another big pro is having a realtime offsite backup and being able to survive simultaneous loss of all my devices, which is plausible in correlated scenarios like a burglary, fire, mugging, car crash, etc, but I don’t know how much others think of that one.
The people I know who use KeePass live like they’re disabled. You ask them to sign up for something and they need to schedule a half hour for it two weeks out. Ask them to use a website and they need to wait until they’re home because their biweekly manual data transfer was put off because of whatever. And if they ever drop their phone, it’s this totally unforeseeable panic they’re still recovering from two months later. I’m far from convinced it must be like this, but I’m also far from convinced that most KeePass people—or people using any other strategy—have really thought this through.
Weird. I keep my KeePass database on NextCloud, and the only difference between home and phone is that on a bad network I may need a few seconds for KeePassDX on the phone to decide to use its cached copy of the database rather than the latest one. It would probably be even smoother if I used Syncthing. I assume non-technical people ought at least be able to put their KeePass files on DropBox?
> I assume non-technical people ought at least be able to put their KeePass files on DropBox?
Non-technical people would not do something this complicated. They don’t even have password managers, let alone a setup like this.
Shoot, even a lot of technical people (like me) wouldn’t bother with this. It’s why I pay for a cloud-based password manager.
Multiple devices and family sharing. My wife and I share several accounts, so it's really nice that we can move them between private and shared vaults on 1Password.
> I just have everything in KeepassXC
Me too, but I rarely add/edit anything in .kdbx file, it rarely changes. So I just keep a copy on my phone and use KeePassDroid to open it sometimes.
If you change/edit your passwords all the time, and you like autofill and I assume other features, networked solutions are much better.
I swap between my phone and my computer. Sometimes I need to get an account password on a workstation, and I can just login online rather than typing several lengthy generated passwords.
Most of the workstations I use completely block USB storage devices (but not fido2 keys!)
What would be super nice is to have USB wedge that I can just send my passwords from my phone to any computer like this https://www.inputstick.com/ (Expensive, sold out and also doesn't ship to the USA)
My KeePassXC database auto-syncs to my Nextcloud instance. Nextcloud client on PCs, Keepass2Android on my phone, and it's the same end result as Bitwarden but without the shenanigans.
Do you have a solution for auto-merging conflicting changes? Because I think that's the real difference, editing on a laptop and on a desktop before the sync can occur, can cause data-loss (for my potentially naive use of keepassxc anyway).
I second what the other commenters have said.
There are several factors at play making conflicts almost impossible:
- A central device can be immediately synced to. For Nextcloud, it could be a server, for direct synchronization that I use (Syncthing), my phone (almost always online) is the intermediate device for all.
- You are usually online when creating accounts/password, so an sync can happen directly after a change
- And finally: How often do you actually _create_ accounts rather than just read the database? And how often do you do it on two devices in quick succession?
I've never seen this happen, because (as far as I can tell) all KeePassXC clients auto-save the file any time a change is made, and all the Nextcloud clients auto-sync as soon as the file changes. Keepass is also resilient to the underlying file changing while you have, say, the edit password dialog open.
If a conflict did happen though, newer versions of Nextcloud just keep both copies and alert you to resolve it. If I had to resolve this I'd probably try the built-in database merger first: https://keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide#_merging_data...
Merge conflicts on NextCloud are terrible, but for a KeePass file, I don't think this comes up very much. My laptop syncs from Nextcloud whenever it's online, and my phone syncs whenever it opens or modifies the file. Nobody else is using my laptop or phone, and certainly not my keepass vault. I would probably have to go out of my way to use both my laptop and my phone offline and add/change passwords during that time in order to get a merge conflict.
Having a password manager synced to phone, desktop, laptop, browsers is handy. I used Keepass 10 years ago but I prefer integrated experiences now, particularly since I often pull them up on mobile.
Also consider teams or multiple teams across an org sharing secrets. Flat files are a tough sell, so these apps eliminate almost all the hassle. We pay for a lot of 1Password accounts, and I couldn’t imagine rolling our own solution.
In my case it's exactly that. I have a Linux gaming workstation, a work-issued (and managed) MacOS laptop and a Google-branded (Pixel) Android phone.
Bitwarden just works in all those places and the tech was, by all accounts, rock solid. AND I can pay for it instead of trying to leech off some privacy-ambiguous free tier.
USB stick in your pocket sounds nice but what happens when you drop your keys and it cracks or you get caught in a rain storm and it gets soaked?
Then the copies that exist on the USB are fried but the original that live at home on your desktop/laptop are fine?
Someone else made it similar comment, so I clarified the phrasing of my original post.
The main backup of allll my files lives elsewhere. Even with a USB-stick of magical capacity and reliability, I wouldn't want to have to remember to plug in in every day.
Syncing is a huge part, UX is another. I was using KeePass on my desktop for several years before I met my wife, and having her use it was a complete failure. She did not like the workflow. Having to open another another tool, login, search for the correct site, and copy/paste the password was too much friction. And that was when things worked.
Syncing was an utter disaster. Inevitably something would cause syncs to be delayed, and then there would be a conflict and one of our changes would be silently lost. We were constantly going to lookup a password we entered, and finding it was not there anymore, at which point I would have to dig through sync conflict backup files and manually reenter the passwords that were lost, or go through the password reset flow for the sites. It was a giant mess, and that was just with two desktops and a laptop. I was using btsync at the time but all the issues I encountered apply to any file based synchronization, like syncthing, nextcloud or dropbox. Performing whole database file synchronization is simply not the right approach for password safe.
I eventually switched over to self-hosted BitWarden with the browser plugin and it has been much smoother.
USB sticks are infamously unreliable, not a great backup plan
I realize the wording in my comment was a little ambiguous, but don't worry, that's in addition to my files in general. (Restic, Backblaze B2, memorized passwords/keys, regular integrity checks of remote data.)
After all, even with godlike storage-media on my keychain, it would still be susceptible to a mugger or falling down a deep hole. Until that happens, it provides redundancy and convenience, provided I can bring it to a trustworthy computer.
I used to use syncthing to solve that problem, until the developer dropped the distribution because of the Google's anti-social behavior.
But the interface of every software on a phone is so atrocious that I have never actually seen any benefit from having a password manager there that I could copy stuff from. So now I just don't have it, and haven't seen any loss yet.
That said, I store way more low-value passwords on the Firefox manager (that is synchronized) than high-value ones on the offline manager.
Is it because everybody else is swapping between several different computers, and you need the synchronization?
.. and phones, and tablets. Yes