Keeping records in more than one place
- Author
- CRYPTO PORT Editorial
- Published
- Updated
- Reading time
- 5 min
In short
How many copies matters less than whether each one fails for a different reason. Check that no single incident can take them all. And too many copies creates its own problem: the ones you stop updating.
Key points
- Copies in the same place or the same account add no redundancy
- Judge the layout by whether one incident could take everything
- More copies means more exposure surface and more copies going stale
- Keep the number within what you can actually keep track of
Definition
Holding the same record in several places that do not share a failure mode — redundancy.
Redundancy is not about quantity. Two sheets of paper in the same drawer both burn in the same fire; two folders in the same cloud account both go when the account does. Useful redundancy means copies whose failure modes do not overlap.
The quickest way to check is to run the scenarios one at a time. If the house burns down, what survives? If the computer dies? If the cloud account is frozen? If the phone is lost? In each case, ask whether both the records and the keys remain. Any scenario where the answer is nothing is a hole in the design.
For key backups, geographic separation is what pays off — your home and a relative's, your home and a safe deposit box — so one local disaster cannot reach both. The trade-off is that the further away a copy is, the less often you verify it exists. Putting an annual check in the calendar prevents a copy from quietly going missing for years.
Too many copies has its own cost. Five stashes of a key backup means five chances that one is seen by the wrong person. Many copies of a record means updating one and leaving the rest stale — and stale information can be worse than none. Two or three places, within what you can genuinely keep track of, is usually the practical answer.
Watch out for
- · Each extra key backup is another way it can leak — more is not automatically safer
- · An outdated copy can mislead you more than having no copy at all
- · If a copy sits with a third party such as a safe deposit box, check the access procedure in advance
Frequently asked questions
How many places should a key backup live in?
Two is a reasonable starting point, kept within what you can track. Focus less on the number and more on whether the places fail for different reasons.