I have a lot of entries in the google authenticator app. Those entries were originally entered by scanning QR-codes. If I lose my phone, those entries are lost, and my experience tells me that some services can not be reset at all without access to 2 step authentication (one service specifically requested a convoluted process with high associated fees in order to verify my identity. I ended up creating a new account - luckily no important data was in the old account)
According to this site (I have not found a better place describing the data needed to generate a QR-code for Google Authenticator), what I need is:
- a label (I assume free text)
- user (does this need to be the real user linked to my account?)
- a key: this is the important part
- a url (is this important, or only for documentation purposes?)
My questions are:
- how do I dump all that data from my current Google Authenticator installation?
- What happens if I enter that data into a new Google Authenticator instance? Will the old stop working? How is this mechanism implemented?
EDIT
I do not want simply to backup the Google Authenticator database so that another instance of Google Authenticator can read it. I do not want the data in any proprietary or binary format.
I want the data in human readable form, ideally as a .txt file, so that I can readily use it for other purposes, be it back it up as I please, enter it in another application (Google Authenticator or any other application), use it manually to generate QR-codes with the service provided above, ...
