I've been carrying a small roll of duct tape in both my wallet and laptop bag for years. I've been taking advantage of the fact that duct tape is the same width as a business card. You just roll some fresh duct table around an old business card ten or twenty times and you'll get a small roll of duct tape that fits right in your wallet.

A year or two ago I found a roll of cloth tape in an ancient first aid kit that we had laying around the house. The first thing I noticed was how similar it is to duct tape. It is fabric reinforced like duct tape, but it is more flexible and less sticky.

It does a great job holding cables together, and it doesn't seem to leave behind the nasty mess duct tape leaves behind when you remove it a few months later. Cloth tape also works great for labeling things, it takes Sharpie ink very well.

The width of cloth tape does not line up as well with a business card as duct tape does. I've come up with a better idea, though. I now wrap three kinds of tape around the length of a business card, duct tape, cloth tape, and electrical tape. The three added together are slightly too big for a business card so there is a tiny bit of overhang.

For years I have been keeping a small font printout of my important SSH and GPG private keys hidden and locked away for safe keeping. I have lost enough floppies, CDs, and DVDs to bit rot so I do not have much trust in them for the long term storage of something this important.

The hard copies are nice, but I sure don't want to have to manually type in an error free copy of my private keys. That is why I now print two copies of each of my keys. One copy is text, the other copy is a QR Code.

QR Codes are popping up all over the place lately. Some of the websites hosting Android software that I use have QR Code images on them, so you can just snap a picture of the code with your smart phone and be taken straight to the web site. This one will bring you to this blog:

An alphanumeric QR Code can contain up to 4,296 characters. This was plenty for my SSH and GPG private keys.

Where Should I Store My Backup Keys?

That would depend on your level of paranoia. You could store them in your safe deposit box at your bank, in a safe at home, under your mattress, or you could bury it in your back yard.

Why Bother Storing a Hard Copy of your Keys?

I am mostly worried about losing my GPG private key. I have gigabytes upon gigabytes of backups and important data encrypted with my key. Completely losing that key would turn all that data into useless bits.

Losing my SSH key(s) wouldn't have nearly as much impact. There would just be a few hosts that I would have trouble logging into. The extra effort to print the SSH key along with the GPG is minimal, though.