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by simpleguitar 1640 days ago
Self hosting sucks for an average user, and terrible for a mobile user. It is possible to have hosted password solution that is secure, so why not use it?

This is basically the same "cloud" vs "on-prem" debate. Cloud won, I think.

3 comments

My setup: - Windows Desktop - Macbook Air

I installed Keepass on my windows desktop along with iCloud drive sync. I keep my Keepass database in my iCloud directory. I can now use this Keepass database on my iPhone (via Files app), on my Macbook (iCloud Drive). Any changes made are automatically synced daily.

Is that really too difficult? And yes, it does "just work".

Bonus: Any passwords stored in my iCloud Keychain are also synced to my Windows Chrome instance via Apple's 'iCloud Passwords'[1] plugin.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icloud-passwords/p...

For what it's worth, my attempt at using Keepass drove me away because the password database kept becoming conflicted, necessitating a merge. Keepass' options for dealing with conflicts were to "accept mine" or "accept theirs", but I'd often end up in situations where the conflict went sideways and I lost my login completely.

In the end I was running the conflict resolution command once every couple days.

Normally I wouldn't mind, but the only time the warning comes up saying that my db file is conflicted is when I need to enter a password in... which is the last time I want to be dealing with this.

This was Keepass with the db file on Dropbox, by the way. Not sure how Syncthing would handle it differently, but it wouldn't have anything to do with merging db files if they go out of sync.

I had this problem as well, these conflicts may happen when you keep Keepass clients open and add passwords on two different machines.

I have written a CLI tool in Rust called keepass-diff that may help you with this: https://github.com/Narigo/keepass-diff

This used to be a problem for me too, but later versions of Keepass happily syncs any conflicting databases. I use Syncthing to share my database.
love this setup.

are you able to sync your keepass database to your windows machine? i need to add this one drawback for people to keep in mind. and also because it happened recently and made hn frontpage. apple can decide to suspend your account for one reason or another. it is very rare but can definitely happen.

The fact that 1Pass is dropping local hosting means I’ll be dropping 1Pass.
I use KeePassDX on Android and KeePassXC on a laptop, and they are synced with Syncthing. I have no issues with this setup
That is not selfhosting. Selfhosting means web/cloud applications maintained by the users. Technically Syncthing is selfhosting but Keepass variants are not. So your setup is not really selfhosting because you are not hosting Keepass in the webserver.