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Be careful where you print these. Most full-featured printer/copier/scanner devices found in office environments can store print job data on the HD where service technicians can access it.

There was also a good thread about paper storage the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142565

I keep meaning to do something like this in combination with Shamir’s secret sharing (which allows you to split a secret into M blocks, of which any N can be combined to recover the key, and M and N are configurable) to distribute a private key among family members in case of my untimely demise so they can more easily access my financial accounts and stuff. Has anyone done that before, and if so, what tools do you prefer? My family members are nontechnical so that’s the biggest challenge.

How safe is printing a private key, considering potential vulnerabilities in the printer software, firmware, and its online connectivity?

Something similar, but encrypted, is PaperAge [1]. Admittedly, I haven't used it, but it seems like a nice solution for secure physical backup of small secrets. The catch, of course, is now you need to make sure you never forget your passphrase or back that up off-site somewhere else.

[1]: https://github.com/matiaskorhonen/paper-age

What is the benefit of using a QR code over just printing and storing the document itself in a human-readable format?

I'm trying to think of when/why I would want to add the extra step of converting to/from QR codes for the documents I keep in my safe, but I'm not coming up with any reasonable use case.

I'm sure I could just be missing the use case(s) the author has in mind, perhaps they should be suggested in the readme.

Edit: Several good examples below, thanks.

Tangential, but why is there a docker image for a simple command line tool like this? Surely a git clone is enough, especially for a Go app, no?

I set up a similar system:

http://github.com/alexjh/gpg-backup/

I printed to photo paper at the exact resolution my HP Photo printer needed, so the quality is excellent.

The usage guide shows which command to run to generate a QR code from a file, and outputs a PDF. But then the command for recovering a file from QR codes takes "file.txt" as input. Is that a typo? Shouldn't that input also be a PDF?

I know that QR keys are designed in a way that protects from visual degradation.

HOWEVER, backup keys are meant to be used in very rare cases. And in these very rare cases I'd like to have a backup key that I can directly type into a terminal with the keyboard. A QR key has one too many dependencies for my liking.

Nice, I'll add to the list of similar thing I made, specifically for keepass.

You tag entries in your keepass DB with "safe-print", then point the tool to the db file, unlock it, then it generates a printout to put in your safe.

https://github.com/kardianos/safekeysheet

This is a neat idea, but unfortunately not very useful to me. I don't own a printer, and I don't want to trust my private keys to a public computer and printer.

> Recover from a PDF with QR codes with a barcode scanner

Barcode scanners scan bar codes, not QR codes.