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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

My master password is written down in a sealed envelope, which has been placed in a secret place that my wife knows (but always forgets). My lawyer has a sealed envelope with the location of the secret place, and my will has instructions to give that envelope to my wife (in case she forgets the secret place, which is often). The will also says who gets ownership of the secret place and the envelope in the case with both die together.

When my kids get older they'll move to the top of the access list for the envelope with the location of the secret place and ownership of said place.

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Gonna suck if you die in a house fire that also burns up that sealed envelope, though.

The envelope is not in the house. :) That would be silly.

Why don't you encrypt your password twice, give the resulting file or string to both of them, replicated twice or more ?

And each one of them has the password for one of the two encryption layers ?

This way it won't get lost.

My family isn't that technically savvy and would probably require help with the decryption, but I'd be dead.

oh, that's a good point, indeed.

I didn't factor in the technical ability of my relatives. I guess I should.

> I guess I should.

Not just technical ability, but state of mind etc. Anything needed quickly (not everyone will have such) should be straightforwardly accessible by someone who is both distracted and busy.

I used to sort my data into organised archives on USB HDDs, until I went to college.

Then I found it time consuming and began to just dump home folders and SD cards onto SATA HDDs for back ups

And now I haven't even done back ups since I began to work.

Tagging some USB stuff would be the most straightforward for them, I guess. A bit like a "play me if I don't come back" VHS as seen in movies.

And I would include the letters to unsubscribe to everything, and GDPR requests to delete my data as mentioned by the creator of the thread in

>So I ask: do you have a procedure in place to grant or transfer access in case of death?

There’s probably a way to low-tech it by printing half of each password glyph (with a suitably ambiguous design) on transparent slides that you need to overlay with each other to be able to read the password.

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