Mistakes happen all the time. You delete an entry you didn’t want to delete, you import the same file twice, you do some unwanted change you really did mean. The are also other things that could potentially happen to a vault, such as the database becoming corrupted and hence not possible to decrypt.
Hence I would suggest Bitwarden to automatically make backups of the vault for the user to download or just have as “restore points”.
If you go to that trouble, it should be “atomic”, real-time backups.
My solution to this is “semi-automatically”:
What is that? - a cron interface?
It shouldn’t be on the user to make backups, they should just automatically happen.
OK but what is that you are showing? - just a sketch or something?
It’s a weekly reminder I have in the Google calendar.
Could this be done using the API and a cronjob? Does the api support the new encrypted export?
The API doesn’t manipulate encrypted data, but the CLI application can be used for this purpose using the export function:
I think this is a free feature on last pass no less. Been using Bitwarden since last summer and I assumed this was a thing in the background just haven’t had the need to check yet, so there really is no backups being saved anywhere and we have to manually do it?
Correct, there isn’t a “vault snapshot” feature currently.
There is a topic for it here though:
Is this on the roadmap?
Would like to see this also!
Thanks for the feedback! Currently you can use the Bitwarden CLI to create automated backups.
How exactly can we create automated backups using the cli? I’ve tried to set it up, but the script always seems to fail because it needs me to enter the master password.
This post goes into more detail: How To: A User's Guide to Backing Up Your Bitwarden Vault
For example the user can select an (or multiple) email and bitwarden could email a .7z (or kdbx) file containing his passwords.
For example the user can select an email and bitwarden could email a .7z (or kdbx) file containing his passwords. It stands to reason that the .7z file would be encrypted using the vault password.
In this case, it would be possible for the user to configure how often bitwarden should send him an email containing the password backup
I also think it would be interesting for bitwarden applications to download all data from the vault in formats (.7zip , .zip or .kdbx), in which case not only the passwords and notes would be present but the files saved inside the vault as well .
How would this feature be better than the ability to export an encrypted copy of your vault using the built-in Export function?
It is a great question.
See, the export function is really great, but I personally see some problems with it. For example the .json file can only be imported again within another Bitwarden account. And the .cvs, which is the most compatible file format with other password managers, is not encrypted.
Another problem is that when you export your vault, you only create a backup of your passwords, which is somewhat inconvenient since Bitwarden, when pressed, offers the option to store files inside the vault as well. So I think the suggested formats would be good options as they can store both passwords and files within them.
For those of us who are tech savvy, creating a backup manually is a lot. And save it anywhere, but for older people who are not so tech savvy it would become a very big challenge, so for them it would be almost impossible for them to backup their vaults frequently. For this reason, I initially suggested the idea of sending files by email so that they would always have a copy of their backups saved as an email attachment.
The idea of putting multiple e-mails as recipients of your vault is so that if you ever get locked out of your vault and your accounts, you can recover your bank of passwords simply by asking your friend who received a copy of your vault in his email. of course the copy would be the encrypted version of your vault.
Would suggest to add this at least to the premium version. You cannot expect from a regular (business) user to do this themselves through an API.