1. Technical catastrophe
Catastrophe Level 1: Total Technical Catastrophe¶
One night, your house burns down. Your laptops, desktops, NAS, backups are all gone, as are your phone(s) and tablet(s). You yourself are fine.
You lose
Access to email accounts, social accounts, banking app, government communication 
Access to password manager, 2-factor authentication, your SSH keys, your Yubikey
Access to hosting accounts, SaaS services, 3rd party systems
your physical bank cards, ID cards, ...
You keep
Knowledge of the systems, the code, your data.
Bank accounts, company existence
What to do¶
Replace your phone¶
- You can buy a phone easily, no need to wait. If all your bank cards are gone, you will need cash to pay for one, though.
- iPhones have a very smooth slick and easy migration process if you still have the old phone. Unfortunately this won't work here. So you will need to restore from a cloud backup. For this, you need your Apple (iPhone) or Google (Android) ID and password. If you had a 256GB phone and only ever used the free 5GB iCloud, without paying for extra storage space, you will not have a full cloud backup.
- restore from iCloud backup (iPhone) • Google backup (Android)
| is restored | on iPhone | on Android |
|---|---|---|
| your contacts | yes | yes |
| your photos | yes | yes |
| your apps | yes | yes |
| your messages | yes | yes |
| biometric on-device 2-factor | yes | yes |
| passwords in password manager | yes | yes |
| 2-factor accounts in Authenticator | depends | depends |
- then get your phone number back, because that might be used for 2-factor authentication too. You will normally need your ID card for this. So you might have to get a temporary ID replacement first.
- then log in to your password manager and get all your passwords back. You will need to log in to your password manager with your master password. If you have 2-factor authentication on your password manager, you will need to use your 2-factor app to get in.
- Restore Google Authenticator: Use the QR code generated by doing an export.
- Restore Microsoft Authenticator: Sign in to your iCloud account. This is where the credentials are stored.
Replace your laptop¶
- Buy the same type (Windows/Mac) laptop like you had before. No need to experiment now.
- If you had a cloud backup, you can restore from that. You will need your backup password.