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by netvarun 3204 days ago
Just a word of caution on google Authenticator - the iOS version didn't seem to be maintained and it didn't have any sort of export or backup feature. I lost all my codes due to a factory reset of my phone. I've ever since (dec 2016) switched to using Authy for my codes.
2 comments

Furthering this, I would use "Duo". It's such a better MFA app. It has lots of better usability features, and should you want they just added iOS back up.

By having just your one Gmail account you are making yourself vulnerable. Google does allow up to 99 character passwords, but still your laptop might be left open and things like that.

I would suggest starting to use email aliases such as those offered by 33mail or Blur which forward to Gmail. Basically instead of using the same username everywhere you now have say 10 or 20 usernames. A lot of people forget that usernames can be as effective as passwords, they in a sense are credentials to.

Also read any of the books by Michael Bazzell.

Also also going all the way here I would get a VPN service for your phone. Then I would go to FladhRouters.com and order a DD-WRT router and embed that VPN (easy to do) in the router, or even better another VPN service.

Oh wow that would be really bad (not catastrophic since again I could recover Google with backup codes and from there email recovery for the other accounts).

I heard good things about Authy but I've been a bit cautious to add yet another service (which sounds ironic considering the 430 accounts I originally mentioned) just for what it seems like a simple TOTP client, and I don't need any other fancy feature such as cross-device sharing because of the above mentioned recovery procedure always being available in extreme cases.

Plus I was under the assumption that Authenticator data was backed up via iOS backups or iOS keyring, but I admit I've never tried it so I'm just speculating.