An offline tool that encrypts files and splits the decryption key among trusted friends using Shamir's Secret Sharing. Open source.
Your File → Encrypt → Split key into 5 shares → Distribute to friends ↓
Any 3 friends → Combine shares → Decrypt → File recovered
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By Brajeshwar 2026-02-072:452 reply Start treating the Future-You like a Stranger. Write for that stranger, your Future-You will thank you. We think we will remember, but we won’t. So, don’t be too harsh on yourself and make it easier for your future-you. If that stranger finds it easier, it will also be for others; your relatives, kids, etc.
Unless your work and life need to be very secretive, or involve matters of national or international importance, I personally think a simpler printed/written format that works without electronics/Internet would be a better option. Of course, the printed details can have simple encryption, which your family/friends can break using day-to-day quirks you shared, such as the family secret codes, the name of that pet in the town you grew up in, or the middle name from the story of your great-grandfather, etc.
Some time ago, my mother-in-law (erstwhile teacher) and my godmother-aunty (businesswoman) began to forget many things. Their kids have tried quite a few phone apps and whatnot with electronics. Finally, I have suggested enforcing just two things: a lot of Valet bowls around the house (at common places in all the rooms) and pocket notebooks with pens attached. They just write anything and everything, from money to kitchen items to anything they want. If they forgot something, refer to the notebooks. If a key is lost, try the Valet Bowl. Now, my plan is to train their muscle memory to drop/pick from the bowl (don’t try to remember) and write things down.
The idea of Valet Bowls comes from something someone mentioned on Hacker News.
This comment right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220059
(Funny how I can remember this comment from many months ago after never implementing the bowls, but I currently can’t remember where my car keys are. Should have implemented the bowls…)
By Brajeshwar 2026-02-075:062 reply Oh God, Yes. Now, in my favorited posts and comments.
For keys, there is only one place: the Keyholder wall-mounted near the main door, while still visible from the main Hall. Not easy to pick and go by “guests” without being seen by someone, but easy for residents to just walk out with one. I got the exact same ones from Amazon and wall-mounted them in all the homes where I serve as Printer-Repair Guy. 10+ years, I kinda have trained every family member’s muscle memory, “Keys go there and only there.” ;-)
Add/Edit: I also have a sticker I printed stuck to the Keyholder, in Monica’s words from Friends, “Got the Keys?”
By m-p-3 2026-02-0818:02 For electronic keyfobs you may want to put them in some sort of "faraday cage" if you leave them near the entrance, it's one of the way car theft happens on some models by relaying or duplicating the fob proximity signal so that they can get in.
By thebruce87m 2026-02-0711:56 “A place for everything and everything in its place”
I talk to future me in code comments all the time and future me really appreciates past me for doing that.
Thank you past me for thinking about future me. Present me happy.
By EvanAnderson 2026-02-0715:35 I consider learning the joy of receiving gifts from my past self to be a major point of career and life development.
By aforwardslash 2026-02-070:22 5 out of 7 means you cannot be in an eg. car accident with more than 2 of them at a time, if there is the possibility of all of them present in the car not surviving.
Im also quite more practical - there are responsabilities that may go beyond a simple memory loss - eg. If one is in a coma or just hospitalized for a long period of time; trusted third parties may require access to your accounts even for simple stuff like paying bills/rent/cloud services.
By bitexploder 2026-02-0620:346 reply Low tech: I put my secret manager password in a physical journal that is locked in a fire proof, water proof vault and hidden somewhere only my partner and myself know where it is. I use a password manager. Everything else goes in the password manager.
This is what I do too, but be warned about “fire proof” - a fire that results in the total loss of your house will create enough heat for enough time that fireproof gun safes and smaller fireproof lockboxes will be destroyed, or even if not, their contents will get hot enough to combust anyway.
A bank safe deposit box offers a different security profile that’s probably more robust against fire because banks burn less often than houses.
It’s probably not practical to really be robust against fire without being buried several feet deep.
By paulgerhardt 2026-02-070:125 reply Just went through this. Sample size one:
While the fire resulted in the total loss of the house it was actually the water from the fire department not the heat that did proportionally more damage.
As a mental model you shouldn’t think of it as “what if my house burns down?” so much as “what if nice strangers roll up to my windows and chainsaw through my roof and spray 50,000 gallons of water in here?”
Yes everything in the mechanical room melted but everything in the rest of the house got hot, smoky, soaked and then moldy.
For root of trust materiel like social security cards, cash, passports put in a ziplock bag in a fireproof, waterproof safe. But for other storage I use clear “Ezy Storage” brand stackable 50L tubs labeled with Homebox QR codes. In the US, Target and Home Depot frequently stock them. I am very anti black and yellow tubs.
The majority of work post-fire goes to itemizing your house inventory for insurance. Even cataloging all your bathroom’s soaps by brand name rather than generic can make $100 difference. Multiply that by 500x different things.
From a threat model perspective I look at rooms from a “what would be salvageable in here if I emptied a swimming pool’s worth of water from some fire sprinklers”. Furniture and TVs are easy to replace. Other stuff less so.
We did that with major hail damage a few years ago. I learned that in a disaster, you should count on everything being junk, and you're lucky if you can salvage anything. We also learned the value of itemized lists.
1500/piece for 20 junk windows I was building a greenhouse with that I dug out of the trash the year before. $250 for a bird feeder because they couldn't find one outside of specialty stores. $40k instead of 10k for a new roof on the shed because it was heavier gauge metal than standard.
Exact replacements can be expensive, but you need to make sure your insurance has 100% replacement instead of adjusted for age or like-kind replacements.
After that experience, we itemized EVERYTHING in the house with make, model, serial number, and color. It was a bitch to get set up, but took the value of our home contents from around 75k to over 250k for exact replacements.
Copies of these records along with our master password for our keepass database are in two bank deposit boxes about 45 minutes apart. For $50/year we can sleep easy.
By Loughla 2026-02-0713:31 We have keys. In the event those are lost or destroyed, they will provide access to an approved list of individuals and drill the lock for $40.
Also they're small town banks, so that makes it easier as well. We don't really need to worry about providing ID, but if we did and couldn't access ID or something like that, we have four other people listed with access, one of which lives hours away in case of a disaster impacting everyone else on the list. They don't have keys but could get into it for us. So for a few hundred dollars, we're set and insured for the declared value of the contents of the boxes (250k max for another $15/year) if the banks are both destroyed as well!
By TacticalCoder 2026-02-077:17 Bank vault can be key+combination (eg three letters) or dual key or others. For example in a dual key: one key from the bank and one key being your own key.
If a key is lost, you go and prove your identity (easier if any bank employee is familiar with you) and ask for a new key. A date is set and a locksmith shall come, you are next to him and next to the bank employee while he uses the bank's key and lockpicks your lock. Then he configures it for a new key (or replace the lock).
It's cost you something like $300 or whatever.
Source: been next to locksmith opening a bank vault, twice, in two different countries. Once for a bank belonging to a deceased family member (we had the key but not the three-letters combination) and once not because I lost my key but because the bank's lock (on my vault) went defective.
So it's not "my key from the my vault at the bank melted during a housefire, so I can never access my vault at the bank anymore" nor is it "I forgot my three-letters combination, so until the end of the universe that bank vault shall stay locked".
By tgsovlerkhgsel 2026-02-077:11 In general, identity (the bank checking who you are) is often involved in regular unlocking and there will be an identity-only recovery procedure that will work even if you lose your usual credential (key, passcode, card, whatever). This may involve drilling a lock and the bill for that.
By ThePowerOfFuet 2026-02-077:13 If you can prove your identity to the bank and have lost your key, they will drill the lock to get you into your box. For a fee, of course.
My insurance agent has recommended that once a year or so I carefully walk through the house with a video recorder, opening every cabinet and drawer and tool box and so on. It's easier than constructing a detailed inventory, but gives you the raw data you need to construct one in the unlikely even that you need it.
By direwolf20 2026-02-0712:08 Apple iCloud, because most people are not using secure tech.
> I am very anti black and yellow tubs.
Would you mind sharing more about these tubs and why you are against them?
By ProllyInfamous 2026-02-080:36 The plastic used in the black/yellow brand is brittle when it gets cold — it breaks upon simple impact/sliding. Also, you cannot see inside them without opening the lid.
The clear plastic is usually a bit thicker, and more rubberized — it'll still break, but more difficultly.
By DonHopkins 2026-02-0712:19 I've seen Breaking Bad. They're a hell of a lot better than a porcelain bathtub for dissolving bodies!
By fragmede 2026-02-0712:19 https://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-27-Gal-Tough-Storage-Tote-in...
As to why they're against them, I don't know their reason, but there used to be only one size of tote. There there was big and small. And then, for some fxcking reason, they decided to make ones that were roughly as big as the big ones. Just enough that you have to take half a second to re-eyeball-ruler measure them. But in isolation, if you've got one in front of you, you can't know if it'll tetris properly with another one until they're side-by-side and it turns out they're not.
Dumbest decision ever.
At least they come in transparent now though
By alsetmusic 2026-02-070:57 This is very interesting and will inform changes in how I secure some items. Thanks for the new perspective.
By ThePowerOfFuet 2026-02-077:06 >put in a ziplock bag in a fireproof, waterproof safe
In the event of a fire, the bag will melt and coat everything in plastic. This may be undesirable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gelsenkirchen_heist
In December 2025, items worth an estimated €30 million were stolen from a Sparkasse bank in the Gelsenkirchen suburb of Buer, Germany. The thieves used a large drill to break into the bank's underground vault and proceeded to crack over 3,000 safe deposit boxes.
By nerdsniper 2026-02-0622:223 reply Don’t need events that extreme. Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them. It can be hard to find articles about them because they don’t make the news like the more remarkable incidents do. Examples of boring security box failures (but that were noteworthy in other ways so they did make the news): Jennifer Morsch, Roberta Glassman, Lianna Sarabekyan (multiple customers affected), Philip Poniz, Wells Fargo in Cape Coral FL, Wells Fargo Katy TX (many customers affected, blamed on road construction down the street), lots of individual stories where banks just totally stopped following their own procedures on ID checking and logging.
The vast majority of these don’t make the news because there’s no proof there was even anything inside the box in the first place so anyone could be lying.
> Mr. Pluard, who tracks legal filings and news reports, estimates that around 33,000 boxes a year are harmed by accidents, natural disasters and thefts.
> Oddly, the bank returned to him five watches that weren’t his. “They were the wrong color, the wrong size — totally different than what I had,” Mr. Poniz said. “I had no idea where they came from.”
By Stratoscope 2026-02-075:23 > Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them.
My late wife had a safe deposit box in the Almaden Valley (San Jose) branch of US Bank. Her key to the box was nowhere to be found. So I had to get the box drilled open.
This would normally require a hefty fee. But the branch was moving to a new location, so they invited customers to make an appointment to show up a Saturday with proper ID for a lock drilling party.
I showed my ID and the death certificate, and we went into the safe to have the lock drilled.
But there was no real drilling involved. The locksmith had a little handheld gadget that she pushed into the lock, gave it a little twist, and the door came right open.
The ironic part? All that was in there were a few pieces of costume jewelry, worth maybe $50 in total.
She was paying more than that per year for the box rental, and if I'd had to pay for the "drilling" it would probably be more than that.
By rationalist 2026-02-0719:34 I was with my mother when she went to close her safe deposit box. Her key did not work, so after checking her ID (could be fake), they used a tool that very quickly removed the lock. We were then left alone in the camera-less room with all of the other boxes and the tool...
By 8n4vidtmkvmk 2026-02-076:271 reply Yes but your house has to burn down and you have to simultaneously lose your memory.
If your house and PC burn, restore from online backup.
If your brain burns, spouse restores from vault.
By qwertfisch 2026-02-0710:012 reply This assumes having a spouse.
Another solution is to engrave your secret on something that’s stable up to household fire temperatures.
By 0cf8612b2e1e 2026-02-0622:024 reply A real innovation from the Bitcoin world! There are several physical password store systems that they have suggested for this kind of use case. The simplest is basically using a nail to punch out a password onto a piece of sheet metal.
By amenghra 2026-02-070:40 Articles such as https://blog.lopp.net/metal-bitcoin-seed-storage-stress-test... will help you pick among the various seed stores out there.
By Terr_ 2026-02-070:08 And so we return to our programming-roots with punchcards. :p
By rustyhancock 2026-02-070:03 Additionally hardware wallets which can use a seed to generate huge variety of keys.
Including AGE keys (so you can encrypt arbitrary data), SSH keys, FIDO2 and passkeys.
Additionally you might want to store a hardware wallet in a deposit box instead of the seed (if you trust the security model).
Just make sure that the metal you use has a high enough melting point.
By direwolf20 2026-02-0712:13 Do people usually find big pools of metal on the ground in burned houses, or is everyday metal fine?
Especially inside a fireproof safe.
Wouldn't trust aluminium, solder, Wood's metal, gallium, or mercury, but apart from that...
By wtetzner 2026-02-0715:06 Maybe a clay tablet (assuming it's safe from water)?
By Wistar 2026-02-0622:49 Tungsten, perhaps.
By heavyset_go 2026-02-072:391 reply That inventory will be available for seizure by court order for any variety of reasons, and you won't ever know about it until it's too late.
Something you keep in your home that no one knows about won't be inventoried.
By willmadden 2026-02-0622:16 Floor safes do better than above-ground safes.
By Spooky23 2026-02-0713:56 Only thing about safe deposit boxes - make sure that things needed in the event of your death, especially your will, are not there.
The bank will seal the box as soon as they discover you are dead, and require a court order. Without a will, the executor will be whatever statutory person your state calls for.
By duskdozer 2026-02-0715:55 >robust
Is there a better class of safe one could use that might be more successful even if not a guarantee? F/e even with a safe deposit box, one might still have some lower-tier items that would be impractical to store in one but you might want to do better than just out in the open.
By victorbjorklund 2026-02-0714:08 Yea, bankbox is probably the best choice. In the extremely unlikely case the bank box gets robbed you will find out about it and can rotate the key.
By kfn 2026-02-0822:02 Well just hope your house doesn't burn down and you lose all your memories at the same time.
By syntaxing 2026-02-072:56 I know there’s metal plates you can self stamp for crypto wallets. I’m sure you can do the same for this purpose.
do you store stuff in a bank? could you tell me more about it? my account gives me access to one for free and been meaning to put a yubikey there for a while but never have
I do. I have a small safe deposit box in my local branch for about $1 a year.
It's great if you want to store some documents. But don't expect _real_ security. It's guarded by a minimum-wage employee, and the keys are usually laughably insecure. Banks know this, so they cap their liability for the loss of the deposit box at around $1000.
So don't even think about storing gold bars there, like they do in movies.
There _are_ companies that provide safe storage for high-value items, but they are pretty exotic.
By eljojo 2026-02-0622:26 that's... a really good perspective to have, thanks for sharing!
By nightshift1 2026-02-0622:123 reply Safe deposit boxes are not safe. There are many stories of peoples stuff going missing.
ex: https://www.cbc.ca/news/safety-deposit-box-protection-1.7338...
https://archive.is/www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-...
By MiddleEndian 2026-02-070:271 reply What if you RAID01 it, so you have four safety deposit boxes, two with the first half of your password, two with the second half of your password? Then no snoop at a particular bank would be able to get your password, but also if one or two go missing, the password won't be lost. And you just check all four boxes once or twice a year to make sure everything is good.
By direwolf20 2026-02-0712:18 Better do Shamir's Secret Sharing instead, set threshold to 2/4, and regenerate all parts if any part goes missing.
By whartung 2026-02-073:23 My (large) bank is yanking their safety deposit boxes out. They let subscribers know that they have, like, 1 or 2 years to go. They're doing it across the branches. They basically feel it's not worth the liability any more, and the way it was presented to me, it's not just them, but other banks are also doing (or at least considering) this.
Things we take for granted. When my father passed, I was digging stuff out of SDBs that he had for decades.
By jerezzprime 2026-02-0623:371 reply Maybe not safe for valuables. What about stuff that has no value to anyone else? I'm not a villain from Ocean's Eleven, no one is stealing my passwords to break into my elaborate safe.
By saulpw 2026-02-070:36 What I found out when I was burgled, was that they don't care. I had nothing valuable in my firesafe but they still took it wholesale. I found some papers from it drifting around outside afterwards like they had dumped it out. But not my passport or SSN card. The lock was even broken so they could have just opened it to see that and saved themselves the lift. But again, they don't care.
This. A physical safe provides something that you can't do digitally: It's hard, but not impossible to get in without credentials.
On the internet, it's either: Public for anyone in the whole world, or impossible to recover if anything goes wrong.
By kylehotchkiss 2026-02-0621:271 reply I've broken into Physical Safes using nothing more than a drill with a half inch bit (I was young and didn't want to drag myself to harbor freight to sacrifice a more suitable tool). Enough boreholes and I had access.
In hindsight, looking harder for the key would probably have been fruitful.
By 0cf8612b2e1e 2026-02-0621:332 reply Nothing says you cannot trivially encode the paper password. Those in the know understand that you need to append “BoomShakalaka”, replace “A” with “Q”, or some other super simple modification to what is recorded.
Maybe the NSA would be willing to brute force the infinite variations from that starting seed, but it is still effectively locked for mortals.
I've thought about making a "word search" and embedding the passphrase in it using a pattern (e.g., a subset of a Knight's tour, a space-filling curve overlay, or some other sampling algorithm).
By unsnap_biceps 2026-02-0622:18 https://www.passwordcard.org/en
I used to keep a password card in my wallet and had a pattern I would use.
By Dylan16807 2026-02-077:17 If you add an explicit reminder to check the email where you explained the modification, then the idea seems solid. Tough at that point put half the password on paper and send the other half to a whole bunch of trusted people.
Alternative - my partner and I (and also two other close contacts) have password managers that contain each of the other one's secret. This was less an effort to help with the memory loss scenario and more of an effort to deal with death and access to services (especially to cease subscriptions and the like).
In a lower trust scenario you could probably use a lawyer as a broker of the secret (potentially even as part of a will).
Password managers like bitwarden also have emergency access features which can do this, with the caveat of trusting them to enforce the requirement of access only being granted after a notification to the account holder is not denied in some time period (but unlike the lawyer you're not trusting them with the secret directly)
By spockz 2026-02-0621:48 Apple has this thing called Legacy Contact which allows the same but then built in to the whole Apple account. This includes devices as well as the iCloud ~~and attached keychains. Granted, it is another hoop to jump through compared to presharing keys with each other.~~
It would be nice if your Apple account could be unlocked with some other keys as well apart from the primary one, but I guess that is what Apple calls the “Legacy Contact Key”.
Edit: okay so the keychain is excluded from this. So back to storing each others passwords in eachothers keychain…
By eljojo 2026-02-0621:58 I didn't know about bit warden doing this until today! I definitely have to look closer into it, been using 1password for more than a decade and I keep being disappointed. I'd definitely like off-sourcing this to someone instead of building it myself
So if you and your partner die, whoever is part of your family is fck.
By wafflemaker 2026-02-078:28 Bitwarden allows a quite large number of emergency contacts.
There are two rules: 1. You need to be a paying customer when setting up. 2. The other person needs to have a Bitwarden account.
By eljojo 2026-02-0621:57 this is honestly a very pragmatic solution. the amount of life-long relationships i've seen vanish overnight has got me to reconsider my choices when it comes to single points of failure.
I like the idea of the lawyer, unlike normal people, they like sticking to their promises.
By rcxdude 2026-02-0620:51 In general whatever kind of backup plan you have for when you die could also work in this scenario, you may just need to think harder about anything that you do not want have revealed when you die.
By eljojo 2026-02-0621:44 sometimes simpler is the best. I am always on the move so vaults don't jive well with me. my concern would be for something to still happen to it, too. I'm trying to go by the principle of not putting all my eggs on one basket.
By tempestn 2026-02-075:44 I'd advise sharing that knowledge with one trusted person outside your household too, especially if you and your partner have dependants.
HackerNews
About this project
This project is an enhanced reader for Ycombinator Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/.
The interface also allow to comment, post and interact with the original HN platform. Credentials are stored locally and are never sent to any server, you can check the source code here: https://github.com/GabrielePicco/hacker-news-rich.
For suggestions and features requests you can write me here: gabrielepicco.github.io
