Password Backup

Question

The following situation/question was bugging me lately.

I have a number of accounts and passwords, still managed "old school" with pen and paper. I am aware of the security implications of that method.

I want to backup my passwords in a secure manner, that allows recovery in case of a disaster that could potentially destroy all hardware and physical copies of passwords.

I thought of the following process:

1. Take a photo with a camera (e.g. DSLR, no phone)
2. Copy photo to a trusted PC
3. Encrypt the photo with a long passphrase (e.g. using .7zip AES)
4. Overwrite copy of photo on both PC and SD-Card
5. Check with a recovery tool if anything of the photo can be recovered
6. Upload encrypted file to a zero-knowledge online backup

I know that the camera may have internal memory holding a copy, but that would be too much for my threat assumption.

Is there a down-side for security? Could this be improved or have I overlooked essential problems?

Answer 1

Your method is fine, but over-complicated.

You could just start using a local password manager like KeePass and upload it to cloud every time you add a new account.

The advantage (or should I say, one of the advantages) is that the file is already encrypted, so no one will be able to access it without your master password (the only one that you have to remember) and you don't have to worry about additional decrypting, like with GPG/encrypted archive.

If you want extra layer of encryption, you can use symmetric encryption using GPG or create an encrypted zip (or any other format that supports encryption).