Your master password

A password manager solves the problem of having two hundred passwords by creating a single one that opens all of them. It is a good trade, and it has one weak point that nobody likes to look at: that one password has no backup. Write it on a sticky note and anyone who walks past your desk has everything. Keep it only in your head and a bad week takes it with you.

Why the usual advice does not work

Every guide tells you to write down your master password and keep it somewhere safe. That advice quietly assumes you have a safe place, and that one place is enough. It is the same envelope problem as always: whoever finds the envelope has everything, and if the envelope burns you have nothing.

Splitting it removes both halves of the problem at once. No single copy is worth anything on its own, and no single copy is worth losing either.

How to do it in five minutes

Write your master password into ShamirVault and choose, for example, three parts of which two recover it. Then:

• One part at home, on paper, somewhere that is not next to your computer.
• One with someone you trust — not necessarily someone technical, they do not need to understand it.
• One in a bank safe deposit box, at your parents’ house, or at the office.

Whoever holds one part cannot read your password, cannot guess half of it, and cannot even tell what it is for. And if one of the three disappears — a fire, a move, an argument — the other two still recover it.

Not just the password

The same applies to everything that unlocks the rest of your life and has no reset button:

• The recovery codes of your two-factor authentication, which are exactly as critical as the password and get stored far more carelessly.
• The PIN or password of an encrypted disk.
• The passphrase of an SSH or GPG key.
• The recovery key of your operating system’s disk encryption.

Check it now, because the day you need it you cannot

A backup you have never restored is not a backup, it is a hope. The failure is almost never the maths: it is a part copied wrong, an l read as a 1, a line missed. ShamirVault makes you check each part against the copy you actually stored, and tells you which one is wrong — while you can still fix it.

Where to start

Splitting and rebuilding are free, work offline, and need no account. Nothing you type leaves your device, and you do not have to take our word for it: the format is published and there is a recovery script that works without the app.