My phone with 2FA codes has died… again… for the 3rd time in something over 2 years (average Poco X3 Pro experience).
I’ve used the Cisco Duo app, mainly for the convenience of automatic backups. After all, this has saved me the last time my main phone died. Connect GDrive, download DB, enter passphrase to decrypt, there you go.
I’ve turned on my still barely functioning 2017 Moto G5s Plus. There I had the Duo app. Upon opening it says something along the lines of “Device offline, showing on-device accounts only.”
How does that read to you? Auto-sync, I thought.
I connected to the internet, refreshed the app, nothing. I go to settings, check the backup… horror!
“Last backup: October 6th 12:06”
I opened the app at 12:06.
Why would you update the backup if it has more recent timestamp than current version?
“Hmm… this phone last backed up in 2023, most recent backup on cloud is 2024, yep, OVERWRITE IT WITH 2023 VERSION!!”
Hmm… this also means I’ve lost access to my Cisco NetAcad school account…
Welp, lesson learned, switching to Aegis.
Since disabling TOTP requires TOTP token, I have no way to disable it. I hope the instance admin can, but SDF has far more important shit to care about.
I am thinking on getting something crazy like Ulefone Armor 24 brick. Though it lacks things like 5G, stereo speakers, and 4K video recording, but I can afford it and have it shipped tomorrow morning.
Pro tip: if you have nextcloud you can set aegis to backup to a folder synced to the cloud, giving you automatic cloud backups. It can keep multiple copies too to prevent a situation like that happening.
But yeah, sorry that happened, hope you find another way to access those accounts.
I do this, but with keepass (keepass on all devices and then sync with nextcloud). Saved my butt a few times, I can go into the file history and pull an old version of the keepass db out of it, and then keepass has a merge feature, so I can pull the old file out, and merge with current to find missing records.
Anyway… backups good.