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Comment by petee | Hacker News Reader

Everyone knocks writing down passwords, but it helped us tremendously that a year prior to my dads death he and my mom went through all their accounts and got usernames and passwords on a sheet of paper.

The one that was forgotten was his cellphone pin; would have been nice to get a copy of his photos (encrypted Samsung)

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This is actually a very good idea, and there's nothing wrong with writing all your passwords onto paper, if you put that paper inside a fireproof safe or safe deposit box. Taping it under your keyboard is when things go bad.

There is hardly anything more secure than writing a password on paper and storing it in a safe. Hell, a password on a post-it on your desk at home in plain view isn't all that bad in most situations.

I constantly recommend the use of password manager and unique credentials everywhere (to prevent cred stuffing attacks). I always get feedback from friends/family that they worry about forgetting the password to the manager. I tell them to write it down and put it in their safe. And it always results in a deer-in-headlights response. They've been told for years to NEVER write down a password.

See this is one advantage of the Google approach - everything is cloud-synced so my photos are all on my Google account hooked to my Google credentials. So even if my phone is locked, all the files that it represents are in my gcloud.

(aside: I still need to get those photos backed up into my home NAS).

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