Recovery Seed Backup Devices

Yubico and the Yubikey review

Broken Yubico YubikeyThe Yubikey seemed like a nobrainer to me.  I was going to buy one and keep it at home and use it on the various pcs, macs, and ipads I use for this blog and business.  Sounds like a great idea right.  Whenever I leave the house, my data would be safe.

I had the ultimate setup.  All my passwords were stored and only accessible with the Yubikey.  I could switch it between computers and still never type in passwords.

Then I realized I couldn't access my Kraken account, Coinbase, or Coinbase Pro on my phone anymore even with the Yubikey.

Then I realized I couldn't use two laptops to access things at the same time.

Then my Yubikey broke.  It physically broke.  I hadn't planned for that.  I had planned on keeping it safe and dry and at room temp.  I never considered that it would break so easily.

I was pretty fucked.

I had many centralized exchange accounts setup to use it.  I had email accounts, business accounts, and bank accounts.  I spent a lot of time setting things up.

It took about two weeks to get access back to all of my trading accounts.  I still haven't fully fixed my Google Adwords account that is tied to the yubikey.  I still need to override something and say I lost the key and use a one time password that it generates.  It is definitely not the normal easy way it was before.

Fixing your accounts after losing access to a Yubikey was pretty terrible.  Maybe I could have setup a backup key and didn't realize it.  Either way, it was not a positive experience.  We were looking into them because it is an item that falls into security and protecting passwords. 

I have been off social media for a while.  I just tried to use Facebook and its tied to the broken key.  I am not sure how to reset FB so that it doesn't need to send me a code each time I try to login.  I am sure I will figure it out eventually but that will probably take me another couple of hours so add that to the list of wasted time.

For the record, the picture is not my actual broken Yubikey.  I had the 5C which was USB C.  The USB C part bent from the body.  I will get a picture of mine up as soon as I can.  I saved it just in case there is a way to get it work.  Wishful thinking.

I finally got my Facebook account back from the Yubikey.  I am not using Google Authenticator.  I know that has its own issues but it works well if you don't lose your phone.

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