I have all my data encrypted on my laptop. All the backup hard drives are also encrypted. I know all the keys by heart and I could pick up any disk, enter the password and restore everything with it. As far as backup is concerned, this is nice.
But what happens if I have an accident and cannot remember the password? My whole digital live would be locked away and there would be no way to bring it back.
Also if I should pass away my relatives would have no way to get my accumulated data. There are vacation photographs they would probably want to have. And things like utility and phone contracts are probably very handy in order to sort things out afterwards. My parents might not even know exactly what I have contracts with (e.g. Spotify).
The data that I have is harmless and legal. So I am not trying to hide any crime, I just do not want somebody to steal my laptop (for the hardware) to obtain access to my emails and such. Same goes for my house, I do not want a thief to take over all my accounts after a physical theft. So its not really secret, it is just private data.
One way I thought of doing this is to give my parents some long random key printed out on paper to store in their house. Then I add this key as a secondary key to the encrypted hard drives. They cannot directly access the data as the computers are in my house but one could quickly get access if something nasty happens.
As my parents and I mutually exchanged house keys it would be technically possible to break into one house and find everything you need to get into the other house. But they would have to know to look for the printed keys at my parent's house. I find this rather unrealistic for the thief-for-money and if some adversary like this is up my back I guess I have bigger problems with online attacks.
Is this a good scheme to provide a backdoor to my encrypted files or is there some better way to do this?
(I am posting this with a new user as I do not want to give anyone ideas when searching for my name.)