Terence EdenJun 7, 2025

Here's the nightmare scenario for anyone who uses a password manager, 2FA, and other modern online security tools.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/06/ive-locked-myself-out-of-my-digital-life/

I've locked myself out of my digital life

Imagine… Last night, lightning struck our house and burned it down. I escaped wearing only my nightclothes. In an instant, everything was vaporised. Laptop? Cinders. Phone? Ashes. Home server? A smouldering wreck. Yubikey? A charred chunk of gristle. This presents something of a problem. In order to recover my digital life, I need to be able to log in to things. This means I need to know my u…

Terence Eden’s Blog
Show threadKhleedrilJun 7, 2025
@Edent I get the impression that you are a clever enough person that you've worked out a solution to this for yourself, and if your house really did burn down you'd get your life back soon enough.
Show threadTerence Eden
@khleedril I regret to inform you that I am *not* that smart!
Jun 7, 2025 at 6:21pmWeb
Show threadKhleedrilJun 7, 2025
@Edent Copy the bootstrap data you need to several USB drives encrypted with a long password you can easily remember ('icanrememBerthispassword,' for example), and scatter the drives around a bit. It doesn't actually matter who you give them to. And yeh, you'll need a scheme in place to refresh them from time to time.
Show threadTerence EdenJun 7, 2025
@khleedril so you're basically saying it is impossible.
Show threadKhleedrilJun 7, 2025
@Edent I am not.
Show threadTerence EdenJun 7, 2025
@khleedril people can't remember long passwords - especially ones they rarely use - that's why they use a manager in the first place!
Show threadKhleedrilJun 7, 2025
@Edent
If your life depends on one, you can remember it. I do. It probably wouldn't be too bad if you used the same one as the master password for the manager.
Show threadAngela ScholderJun 7, 2025
@khleedril @Edent I'm specifically not using the same PW for the extra online storage space I've just added as is used for the KeePass database in it.
Show threadstrudsJun 7, 2025

@Edent @khleedril For the way companies have trained us to make passwords (random string of numbers punctuation and lower and uppercase letters) this is true.

But remembering it's the last sentence of your favourite book would just mean you need to pop to the library (you don't even need a library membership as you're not going to borrow the book) to look up the password.