Scenarios

1. Someone close to you has died or been incapacitated, and pointed you here. You are in the right place. They were following a protocol — one that anticipated this exact moment.

• If you are familiar with this protocol, jump straight to Protocols.
• If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry. Just keep reading; it will tell you what kind of system this is and route you to what you need. Take your time. The protocol is designed to wait for you.

2. You’re handling a contingency — a possibly compromised password, a lost master password, an upcoming trip, or any other moment the system was built for. Go straight to Protocols for the step-by-step.

For everyone else

This is a guide to managing digital secrets — but probably not the kind you’ve seen before.

For better or worse, the digital world keeps stopping you in your tracks with screens that say “Set a PIN”, “Choose your password”, “Continue with Google?”, or “Please back up your 2FA recovery codes.” And whatever little ritual you have for getting past that screen probably comes with a flash of anxiety — “I must not forget this”, or “could a hacker get this?”, or “I should write it down somewhere so my wife can find it.” But like most people, you push those thoughts aside. You’ll do it “properly” later. Or maybe never. What are the odds anyway?

This guide exists because the answer, eventually, stops being reassuring.

Or perhaps that sketch isn’t you at all. You have a password manager, hardware keys, maybe even an offline backup. You’ve solved for attack and for mistakes. But there is a third failure mode that almost no system accounts for: what happens the day you cannot be there to maintain it?

Maybe you’ve thought of that, too. There’s an envelope somewhere, a lawyer briefed, the right person told. But a plan that has never been tested is just a plan you hope will work. And could a patient bad guy use your plan to your disadvantage?

Most approaches to this problem put you in one of two positions: hold everything yourself, or hand it to a corporation. This guide is built on a third option — one that most people already have and almost nobody has formalised. It is less about technology than you might expect. And it changes how you think about the problem entirely.

It is opinionated, practical, and free. Start with the Introduction →