What is this?

This is the Secrets Management Survival Guide — a handbook for managing digital secrets without losing your mind or your life’s work. Probably not the kind of guide you’ve seen before.

You landed here for one of four reasons

1. Someone close to you has died or been incapacitated, and pointed you here. You are in the right place. They were following a protocol — one that anticipated this exact moment.

• If you are familiar with this protocol, jump straight to Protocols.
• If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry. Just keep reading; it will tell you what kind of system this is and route you to what you need. Take your time. The protocol is designed to wait for you.

2. You have implemented this protocol and you are back for reference. Perhaps you have compromised a password, need to perform your yearly review, or are dealing with another situation the system was built for. Use the menu to navigate to what you need.

3. You don’t have a decent protocol for managing your or your loved ones’ digital secrets — and the gap worries you. You want something you can rely on for yourself, and that the people closest to you could follow if you were no longer here to run it. You want to be the person in scenario 2 so that, if it ever comes to it, they can be the person in scenario 1.

4. You already have your own approach — and you would like something to compare it against. Perhaps it lives mostly in your head, in a password manager, or in a notebook in a fireproof safe. You suspect there are edges you have not yet pressure-tested. This is a complete, opinionated protocol, written so you can hold yours up against it.

Why this guide exists

Two presuppositions sit underneath everything that follows:

1. Managing digital secrets is not optional. Whatever sits behind those secrets has real weight — money and investments, ideas and creative work, photos, correspondence, crypto wallets, health data, or just your run-of-the-mill Instagram and Amazon accounts.
2. Real value means real risk. Others may try to steal or damage it; you may leak it through mistakes; or you may lock yourself out altogether — through accident, incapacity, or death.

Layer on top of that an endless churn of tools, platforms, loudly argued opinions, and Surfshark VPN adverts — it is easy to feel overwhelmed before you have made a single deliberate choice.

Most approaches to this problem put you in one of two positions: hold everything yourself, or hand it to a corporation. This guide is built on a third option — one that most people already have and almost nobody has formalised. It is less about technology than you might expect. And it changes how you think about the problem entirely.

This site offers this third option as an opinionated and practical guide. Start with the Introduction →