I live in a fire prone area. I have a safe deposit box 30 mins away in a place that won't burn. I keep a HD there with all my photos on it. I refresh the drive monthly. The chance that this small credit union with maybe 100 boxes will lose, toss or sell my box on fire day is pretty minimal.

Yes, safe deposit boxes are not always as safe as spy movies would have you think (or even that we should assume them to reasonably be), but they can still be used as part of a disaster recovery strategy.

> A firesafe in a friend or relative's basement is a much better choice

The article addresses these options and why they are not ideal either.

Also, one thought experiment I just came up with: how many of your friends are you willing to let store their pendrives in your basement's firesafe? How often would you be comfortable with your friends coming to your home to update their pendrives?

I know several who I believe would be fine with it, all of whom I see regularly, usually down our usual pub, and all of whom would I suspect be happy to do an update at least every couple months in return for me buying them a few drinks for the hassle.

I already have multiple friends who have copies of my house key held in case something really stupid happens, none of whom found that weird and all of whom I'm willing to trust enough that I believe the risk of having multiple such copies extant but unmarked is significantly less than the risk of not having that fallback plan.

In fact, they all considered "being one of the spare key holders" to be an honour more than anything else.

I am very much aware that there are many people whose situations are very different than mine, but it works for me (and they're all wonderful people for whose existence I try to be appropriately grateful.)

The only thing that needs to be on this pendrive is the master password to the password vault and a separate yubikey.

What is the fascination with pendrives? Can't it be a piece of paper?

I suppose they might want to encrypt a pendrive in case it was stolen from the friends housse. But you could do something similar with a piece of paper.

Pendrives aren't known for storing particularly well over the long term so they probably aren't a great choice anyway.

I suppose an overheated safe would not be good for either a flash storage or paper. Maybe engrave the pdf on a piece of metal :-)

That's what the scientologists did with all of L Ron Hubbard's books.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/la90/la90-1f.html

Only given how the article assumes everything burned down, your friends house would also have been struck by freak lightning of doom.