| Some things I would consider: - Have an emergency google account with stuff that is only relevant for the emergency, limited access, that you could login into from anyone's computer, not worrying that you would also compromise more important data - Use Authy and remember its backup password for 2FA codes - Use an offline password manager for important passwords, use an online manager with no 2FA for passwords relevant to an emergency situation - Keep an online backup of all your data, encrypted, on some storage service in another region - Have an emergency pendrive that has the encrypted backup of all your data and carry it with you all the time (I keep it in my wallet). Nowadays it's easy to get a 512GB pendrive. Bonus is if you are linux user and the pendrive also has a bootable system, so you can boot your entire system from a pendrive, on any computer. - Remember multiple complex passwords and use them regularly - use muscle memory + have a recovery note just in case you forget it (see the last paragraph) Note that it's unlikely for multiple things to fail at once. I.e. my laptop could get stolen or an external backup HDD could break, but it's unlikely to happen at once. All could be destroyed in a single event (like the post describes), but then there's the offshore online backup - it's extremely unlikely that it would be nuked at the same time (unless literally in a nuclear war, but that would be a bigger problem). You could also forget the encryption and password manager passwords, but again, it's unlikely it would all happen at the same time. On another note, I did lock myself out partially and almost locked myself out completely, due to forgetting a password used for encryption. I mis-typed a password to one of my password managers once, then as I tried to enter it again and again, the pattern got scrambled in my brain. That was not that difficult to recover from. But I almost did forget the password that I use to encrypt my /home and all backups. I followed the lessons from the previous mistake, took some 30 min pause and retyped the password (after 3 unsuccessful attempts previously) and I logged in. Whew. From then on, I store a part of the password on a piece of paper, scrambled with other passwords and remember the rest. The point is, never trust on muscle memory alone to store the password. It's possible to make a mistake, once you make a single mistake, it's possible to repeat the mistake and untrain the correct password from your brain permanently. |