The Bitwarden clients all keep a cached copy of your password database, which can be viewed even if your server goes offline (you just can't make edits) - you can even export it when that is the case.

However, if you log out of Bitwarden, it erases the local cache off that device, which will require your server to be online in order to retrieve again (or export it from a different device that is still signed in).

May I ask what is wrong with your archaic setup?

I have exactly the same config and I find it easy and reliable for not asking for a change.

Am I missing some points or what is going on?

Passwords are cached at the client for a minimum of 30 days as long as you stay logged in. this goes into specific details. (You use the bitwarden client for vaultwarden in case you weren't aware)

Edit:clarification

you should simply back it up. What's the point here?

The bitwarden client caches the database locally, so you can still access your credentials even if your server is down.

Depending on which database you have, backup strategy may vary. One lovely approach for SQLite is litestream + backblaze. For a small server like yourself it will fit in the free tier ;)

Part of the fun of selfhosting is the challenge of figuring these things out and building your solutions. If you decide to go with the selfhosted bitwarden variant, there are a couple of options:

1. you can directly dump the entire database on a fixed schedule, compress it into a gzip archive, and store it in a separate location on your VPS. These backups take up very little space and can, with the help of a script, be automated very well.
2. you can use one of the plenty existing bitwarden backup containers that are made for this exact purpose and might offer a more comfortable setup.
3. with any of these solutions, you'd probably want to pull these backups from your local storage to some remote storage, to ensure that in case of an accidental and complete server wipe, no data is lost / a recent backup is available. this can be done with solutions like rclone, to copy the files from your server to a remote location, like an FTP server you've rented or any cloudstorage you may have available.

There's probably even more options, but these are the ones I could think of quickly. If you have questions or need help regarding any of these, let me know, and I'll send you additional ressources to read through.

So I have a question, what can I do to prevent that from happening? Apart from hosting everything on my own hardware of course, for now I prefer to use VPS for different reasons.

Others have mentioned that client-caching can act as a read-only stopgap while you restore Vaultwarden.

But otherwise the solution is backup/restore. If you run Vaultwarden in docker or podman container using volumes to hold state... then you know that as long as you can restart Vaultwarden without losing data that you also know exactly what data needs to be backed up and what needs to be done to restore it. Set up a nightly cron job somewhere (your laptop is fine enough if you don't have somewhere better) to shut down Vaultwarden, rsync it's volume dirs, and start it up again. If you VPS explodes, copy these directories to a new VPS at the same DNS name and restart Vaultwarden using the same podman or docker-compose setup.

All that said, keeypass+filesync is a great solution as well. The reason I moved to Vaultwarden was so I could share passwords with others in a controlled way. For single-user, I prefer how keypass folders work and keepass generally has better organization features... I'd still be using it for only myself.

I used to use your strategy. It works fine. But since I migrated to Nextcloud on a VPS, I use the next cloud password manager. It keeps a copy of the database stored on my device.