[lock-the-spock]

Another different failure point. I once broke my android phone and bought and set up a new one - only to find I can no longer access my Gmail account that I used before with my Google authenticator, so I am locked out forever from that account. I had a backup but was not able to find it. Despite knowing hundreds of contact emails (all backed up in thunderbird), account history, password history, etc - for years I have not been able to get back in.

[doodlesdev]

> I had a backup but was not able to find it.

So you didn't have one lol. I understand that's an extremely frustrating situation though. Part of making backups is testing them once in a while (at least making sure they exist). Something else you could've done previously was to use Authy or Aegis which helps you backup the seeds themselves encrypted under a passphrase so you can recover the accounts even if you lose everything else. Although of course, all of this depends on your threat model, if you don't care about SIM swaps or if losing the account is still much more worrying then I guess it's just a unnecessary hassle/risk.

[projektfu]

With Authy I can enter a backup password and download everything to a new phone. I suppose that's a different failure point but still possibly worth the trade-off? Yubikey is the next level up.