I debate this with myself often. Short of renting a security box and telling people I trust about it, I haven’t come up with a strategy for the master password. At the moment, I’ve resigned myself to the feeling that if I lose my memory, maybe it’ll be the opportunity for a fresh start, and so losing everything is a feature not a bug.
And if you can't update your blog or can't pay for it because you lost your memory? The low tech solutions can't be beat, especially if you expect others to help you pick up the pieces with minimial technical sophistication.
I wrote a tool for this[1,2], though it's still a work in progress (all the features work but I still need to finalise the QR data format and work on user-friendly interfaces).
I wish I found your app before I wrote mine [1] :) you seem to be way better versed in cryptography than I am. What's the advantage of having the main document and the keys separated?
I wouldn't say I'm very well-versed in cryptography. The reason they're separated is that it allows you to:
* Further split up the trust such that the key shards can be held by one group but they don't have access to the document (maybe you keep a copy of the document with a lawyer but distribute the keys among your friends and family so that if your lawyer is hacked or bribed they can't reveal the secrets, same goes for if your friends conspire against you).
* Make the shards small, independent of the document size, so that they're always practical for friends to store even if you have a very large document to save.
* You can do a quorum expansion (create new shards that are compatible with the existing shards) without revealing the secret.
To be fair, for practical uses this is not super necessary but it adds flexibility without losing anything in return (I would argue the quorum expansion point is actually a useful feature).
Bitwarden (premium) has a really nice service of granting access to emergency contact based on prespecified wait time [1]. This can be used in any emergency situation.
Just send four trusted family members half of the passphrase in a sealed envelope and tell them what it's for. If your family has a lawyer or safe deposit box trusting that instead is a 1000x better option.
Despite the issues, there are still valid uses for a safe deposit box. I live in a highly fire-prone area and keep a backup drive with family photos and documents in a safe deposit box in a local place that won't burn when I do.
So long as you don’t expect the drive to be there when you retrieve it, sure. You should probably also encrypt any sensitive document on it. Here’s one example. Just one:
Can lawyers be trusted with this? Do they also properly manage their own death and other events? I don't have any experience and I'm genuinely curious how all this works.
Fire safes are so shitty you'd probably be better off buying a small one to keep your documents/backups in and then a larger one to put that safe in for double insulation.
