Vaults is great thing for protect sensitive data, but there is a little chance somebody may copy our Vault and delete it on our computer. What we can do? Pay that person?
So… Just allow to backup and restore Vaults in simple way - by GUI. That could be additional security layer.
Wouldn’t it work to just include your vault(s) directory in your back up system?
Maybe, but normal users do not have time to configure anything. And where is the Vault directory? Do you thinking about mount directory? That would not make sense. If not, then user would not read documentation.
Where you set it when you set up the Vault. By default it is in ~/.local/share/plasma-vault/.
Unless I misunderstand how Vaults work (and that is quite possible), it should be enough to just back up the encrypted image from there and remember the password.
You could find yourself in the same situation with a normal, unencrypted file, if you don’t have a backup…
Even the most simple method of backing up your /home/$USER directory (e.g. dragging/copying the /home/$USER directory to a USB drive in Dolphin) will also copy your default vaults’ directory (which is located in /home/$USER/.local/share/plasma-vault/ - as @hook already mentioned).
So the best “security layer” here would be to make frequent backups IMHO…
But if an untrustworthy individual has physical access to your unprotected computer, you do have a problem anyway!
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rsync is usually installed by default on any distro, but you can install the GUI for it called grsync and use it to do a backup of your ~/ directory just make sure you put the following in the “Additional Options” box.
--exclude .cache
The user has to specify the vault directory when creating the vault.
So it is like providing a “Save File As” location when creating a file, and the user can point to whatever - hopefully backed up - location they want. And the default location is in the user’s home directory, which is hopefully backed up already.
Maybe the missing piece not provided by the UI is the information where an existing vault is located. People forget after a while - even the default seemed fine at the time.
This is really no different from anything else; if you want resilience against the possibility of any kind of data loss, you need regular backups. Backing up the contents of your home folder will include Vaults data.
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