The brave sync feature ever since it was released a few years ago has been solid, easy to understand, setup and use. Now my old 24 word phrase does not work anymore?
Correct me if I am wrong but now sync requires a 25 word phrase. The first 24 words in this phrase are static and will never change but the 25th word will change everyday?
If this is the case then how would I restore my bookmarks on a new device if I lose my devices or my devices get destroyed? I backed up my sync phrase for that reason alone in the event I lose my all devices for good, just as one should with a bitcoin or monero seed phrase. But when you restore your bitcoin or monero phrase, and monero uses a 25 word seed phrase, it does not rotate the last word daily. Imagine if you wrote down your 25 monero seed phrase correctly and when you needed to recover your funds on a new device, the last word is incorrect because it changes every day?
This makes no sense, it is like creating a password for some account and the last character of the password changes daily, how will the user easily or ever login to their account if their password is constantly changing.
Is there a way to backup your 25 word sync phrase and be able to rely on it to recover your sync account?
That is true, for now. There’s a possibility of this changing. Whether it be to make it all dynamic or static is the question. Part of the purpose for making it dynamic was an extra layer of security, though that’s being debated as to its usefulness if a person can easily identify what is changing and has a way to recover the word, such as exists now.
Brave doesn’t have Sync meant to be a way to restore your info. It just was to help devices communicate with each other. Otherwise they expect you to export your data and/or do regular backups of the device to keep it safe.
You’d occasionally move your \brave-browser folder from desktop to an external drive or would export the data to a safe place. Obviously, if you have multiple devices synced, then you’d easily be able to pull the fresh sync code from one of those. But if you only have 1-2 devices that might somehow both get lost/damaged, then you shouldn’t count on Sync as a solution.
Umm, to be fair, if you work with confidential or highly secure materials, you tend to have to change your passwords often. I always felt it made it more unsecure but places I worked Security would make us change passwords every 30 days, give or take. It was a pain having to constantly come up with new passwords and remember them, especially since it wouldn’t let us use old ones.
Anyway, just meant to say that constantly changing is thought to be more safe, especially since there’s always chances of data breaches or other issues occurring in various places. But I do agree that they need to have it more static and is something I’ve been trying to push them toward.
Warning: Brave does not officially support using the Sync code as a backup and you should not rely on this continuing to work in to the future. Use the export functionality in bookmarks and the password manager instead.
If sync is not meant as a backup and just to sync data such as bookmarks between devices, that is fine since I do backup my bookmarks often.
Therefore there is no need to every backup/write down your sync phrase since when you want to pair a device, you get the sync phrase of the day from device A or B and put it in device C to add device C to the sync chain?
However what if I lose my sync phrase? Will my sync data such as my bookmarks be on brave’s sync servers forever and cannot be deleted? Or will any data such as bookmarks be deleted from the brave sync servers over a period of inactivity?
It’s like you said above, you would use one of the other devices. If you somehow lose all devices that were on the sync chain, then you just kiss that info goodbye and have to start over again, basically.
Yes and no. The data is all encrypted and primarily kept on devices, but is it stored and passes through Brave’s servers.
In order to completely delete/erase Sync data, you would have to contact Brave. To quote from one of the people in charge or security for Brave when talking about how to delete a sync chain if it is believed that it might be compromised (such as accidentally sharing your sync code):
The best course of action is to flag this to one of the Brave support staff here, or to email [email protected] requesting for your Sync account to be deleted.
In both cases, we will need a screenshot of brave://sync-internals/ showing the Sync username. (Therefore, users should not Disable Sync that way because then they won’t be able to take that screenshot.)
You could likely save that Sync username and save it to the side, if you want to have it for a way to remove it in the future, as I don’t know if that changes, but that would just be to delete it and not to recover the data.
I’m not sure about this. I’d have to see if perhaps @Alexey might be able to answer.
Brave’s sync is a very useful feature BUT having to change/update 25th word each is is unreasonable. I successfully sunk two personal [WIN10/WIN11] computers and today I encountered this same issue.
You’d think AT LEAST if computers lose snyc due to 25th word change, all machines would keep/remember last state. In my case my WIN10 machine lost all knowledge of latest state. Only after correcting 25th word did machines re-sync.
IMO users should have option to have 25th word change daily or remain static until user wishes to generate new sync code phrase.
If Brave Sync World Phrase changed to 25th word, why I have 13 word on all connected 3 devices and when I try to add another device, it says phrase is invalid. All my brave browsers are updated.