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This is what I do too, but be warned about “fire proof” - a fire that results in the total loss of your house will create enough heat for enough time that firep
by repiret 8mo ago
This is what I do too, but be warned about “fire proof” - a fire that results in the total loss of your house will create enough heat for enough time that fireproof gun safes and smaller fireproof lockboxes will be destroyed, or even if not, their contents will get hot enough to combust anyway.
A bank safe deposit box offers a different security profile that’s probably more robust against fire because banks burn less often than houses.
It’s probably not practical to really be robust against fire without being buried several feet deep.
- eljojo 8mo agodo you store stuff in a bank? could you tell me more about it? my account gives me access to one for free and been meaning to put a yubikey there for a while but never have
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- cyberax 8mo agoI do. I have a small safe deposit box in my local branch for about $1 a year. It's great if you want to store some documents. But don't expect _real_ security. It's guarded by a minimum-wage employee, and the keys are usually laughably insecure. Banks know this, so they cap their liability for the loss of the deposit box at around $1000. So don't even think about storing gold bars there, like they do in movies. There _are_ companies that provide safe storage for high-value items, but they are pretty exotic.
- eljojo 8mo agothat's... a really good perspective to have, thanks for sharing!
- nightshift1 8mo agoSafe deposit boxes are not safe. There are many stories of peoples stuff going missing. ex: https://www.cbc.ca/news/safety-deposit-box-protection-1.7338220 https://www.cbc.ca/news/safety-deposit-box-protection-1.7338... https://archive.is/www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box-theft.html https://archive.is/www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-...
- jerezzprime 8mo agoMaybe not safe for valuables. What about stuff that has no value to anyone else? I'm not a villain from Ocean's Eleven, no one is stealing my passwords to break into my elaborate safe.
- saulpw 8mo agoWhat I found out when I was burgled, was that they don't care. I had nothing valuable in my firesafe but they still took it wholesale. I found some papers from it drifting around outside afterwards like they had dumped it out. But not my passport or SSN card. The lock was even broken so they could have just opened it to see that and saved themselves the lift. But again, they don't care.
- MiddleEndian 8mo agoWhat if you RAID01 it, so you have four safety deposit boxes, two with the first half of your password, two with the second half of your password? Then no snoop at a particular bank would be able to get your password, but also if one or two go missing, the password won't be lost. And you just check all four boxes once or twice a year to make sure everything is good.
- direwolf20 8mo agoBetter do Shamir's Secret Sharing instead, set threshold to 2/4, and regenerate all parts if any part goes missing.
- whartung 8mo agoMy (large) bank is yanking their safety deposit boxes out. They let subscribers know that they have, like, 1 or 2 years to go. They're doing it across the branches. They basically feel it's not worth the liability any more, and the way it was presented to me, it's not just them, but other banks are also doing (or at least considering) this. Things we take for granted. When my father passed, I was digging stuff out of SDBs that he had for decades.
- ses1984 8mo agoAnother solution is to engrave your secret on something that’s stable up to household fire temperatures.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 8mo agoA real innovation from the Bitcoin world! There are several physical password store systems that they have suggested for this kind of use case. The simplest is basically using a nail to punch out a password onto a piece of sheet metal.
- echoangle 8mo agoJust make sure that the metal you use has a high enough melting point.
- Wistar 8mo agoTungsten, perhaps.
- direwolf20 8mo agoDo people usually find big pools of metal on the ground in burned houses, or is everyday metal fine? Especially inside a fireproof safe. Wouldn't trust aluminium, solder, Wood's metal, gallium, or mercury, but apart from that...
- wtetzner 8mo agoMaybe a clay tablet (assuming it's safe from water)?
- rustyhancock 8mo agoAdditionally hardware wallets which can use a seed to generate huge variety of keys. Including AGE keys (so you can encrypt arbitrary data), SSH keys, FIDO2 and passkeys. Additionally you might want to store a hardware wallet in a deposit box instead of the seed (if you trust the security model).
- 8mo ago
- Eduard 8mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gelsenkirchen_heist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gelsenkirchen_heist In December 2025, items worth an estimated €30 million were stolen from a Sparkasse bank in the Gelsenkirchen suburb of Buer, Germany. The thieves used a large drill to break into the bank's underground vault and proceeded to crack over 3,000 safe deposit boxes.
- nerdsniper 8mo agoDon’t need events that extreme. Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them. It can be hard to find articles about them because they don’t make the news like the more remarkable incidents do. Examples of boring security box failures (but that were noteworthy in other ways so they did make the news): Jennifer Morsch, Roberta Glassman, Lianna Sarabekyan (multiple customers affected), Philip Poniz, Wells Fargo in Cape Coral FL, Wells Fargo Katy TX (many customers affected, blamed on road construction down the street), lots of individual stories where banks just totally stopped following their own procedures on ID checking and logging. The vast majority of these don’t make the news because there’s no proof there was even anything inside the box in the first place so anyone could be lying. > Mr. Pluard, who tracks legal filings and news reports, estimates that around 33,000 boxes a year are harmed by accidents, natural disasters and thefts. > Oddly, the bank returned to him five watches that weren’t his. “They were the wrong color, the wrong size — totally different than what I had,” Mr. Poniz said. “I had no idea where they came from.” https://archive.is/j8e6x https://archive.is/j8e6x
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Stratoscope 8mo ago> Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them. My late wife had a safe deposit box in the Almaden Valley (San Jose) branch of US Bank. Her key to the box was nowhere to be found. So I had to get the box drilled open. This would normally require a hefty fee. But the branch was moving to a new location, so they invited customers to make an appointment to show up a Saturday with proper ID for a lock drilling party. I showed my ID and the death certificate, and we went into the safe to have the lock drilled. But there was no real drilling involved. The locksmith had a little handheld gadget that she pushed into the lock, gave it a little twist, and the door came right open. The ironic part? All that was in there were a few pieces of costume jewelry, worth maybe $50 in total. She was paying more than that per year for the box rental, and if I'd had to pay for the "drilling" it would probably be more than that.
- willmadden 8mo agoFloor safes do better than above-ground safes.
- paulgerhardt 8mo agoJust went through this. Sample size one: While the fire resulted in the total loss of the house it was actually the water from the fire department not the heat that did proportionally more damage. As a mental model you shouldn’t think of it as “what if my house burns down?” so much as “what if nice strangers roll up to my windows and chainsaw through my roof and spray 50,000 gallons of water in here?” Yes everything in the mechanical room melted but everything in the rest of the house got hot, smoky, soaked and then moldy. For root of trust materiel like social security cards, cash, passports put in a ziplock bag in a fireproof, waterproof safe. But for other storage I use clear “Ezy Storage” brand stackable 50L tubs labeled with Homebox QR codes. In the US, Target and Home Depot frequently stock them. I am very anti black and yellow tubs. The majority of work post-fire goes to itemizing your house inventory for insurance. Even cataloging all your bathroom’s soaps by brand name rather than generic can make $100 difference. Multiply that by 500x different things. From a threat model perspective I look at rooms from a “what would be salvageable in here if I emptied a swimming pool’s worth of water from some fire sprinklers”. Furniture and TVs are easy to replace. Other stuff less so.
- alsetmusic 8mo agoThis is very interesting and will inform changes in how I secure some items. Thanks for the new perspective.
- Loughla 8mo agoWe did that with major hail damage a few years ago. I learned that in a disaster, you should count on everything being junk, and you're lucky if you can salvage anything. We also learned the value of itemized lists. 1500/piece for 20 junk windows I was building a greenhouse with that I dug out of the trash the year before. $250 for a bird feeder because they couldn't find one outside of specialty stores. $40k instead of 10k for a new roof on the shed because it was heavier gauge metal than standard. Exact replacements can be expensive, but you need to make sure your insurance has 100% replacement instead of adjusted for age or like-kind replacements. After that experience, we itemized EVERYTHING in the house with make, model, serial number, and color. It was a bitch to get set up, but took the value of our home contents from around 75k to over 250k for exact replacements. Copies of these records along with our master password for our keepass database are in two bank deposit boxes about 45 minutes apart. For $50/year we can sleep easy.
- heavyset_go 8mo agoThat inventory will be available for seizure by court order for any variety of reasons, and you won't ever know about it until it's too late. Something you keep in your home that no one knows about won't be inventoried.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- syntaxing 8mo agoI know there’s metal plates you can self stamp for crypto wallets. I’m sure you can do the same for this purpose.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 8mo agoYes but your house has to burn down and you have to simultaneously lose your memory. If your house and PC burn, restore from online backup. If your brain burns, spouse restores from vault.
- qwertfisch 8mo agoThis assumes having a spouse.
- Spooky23 8mo agoOnly thing about safe deposit boxes - make sure that things needed in the event of your death, especially your will, are not there. The bank will seal the box as soon as they discover you are dead, and require a court order. Without a will, the executor will be whatever statutory person your state calls for.
- victorbjorklund 8mo agoYea, bankbox is probably the best choice. In the extremely unlikely case the bank box gets robbed you will find out about it and can rotate the key.
- duskdozer 8mo ago>robust Is there a better class of safe one could use that might be more successful even if not a guarantee? F/e even with a safe deposit box, one might still have some lower-tier items that would be impractical to store in one but you might want to do better than just out in the open.
- kfn 8mo agoWell just hope your house doesn't burn down and you lose all your memories at the same time.