Moz in Oz • December 26, 2022 8:35 PM

Writing down the master password is all but essential if there’s anything important in your password database. The lawyer who did my wills (living and dead) was adamant about that. There are fun crypto system to let you distribute bits of a password around so that it’s harder for people who have other things to think about to make it work at all. Meanwhile you’re in a coma and the bailiffs are selling your house, “comes with a ready-made family for the lucky buyer”. Write the bloody thing down, put it in a safe place. My lawyer has half the password plus a list of people who each have a copy of the other half. And they have a copy of the file from ~2 years ago, and know how to get the latest one off my website(s), and that my work has a copy of it.

Security is always a balance, and I’ve been around long enough to have seen a few too many “Bob died so his website is gone forever”, not to mention seen families wandering lost in technology wondering whether Bob really had investments at all, or were they concealing a gambling problem (trick question, it was both: they invested in cryptocurrency). If no-one knows where you invested they can’t use your death to access those funds.