Hope you plan ahead for a house fire with a 3-2-1 approach for backups. Maintaining an always on off-site storage is expensive unless you resort to cloud solutions like OneDrive or Dropbox, but then you go back to the problem of having your passwords on the cloud, even if encrypted.

Not using cloud is just very expensive and time consuming for the average user.

Passwords are small enough that you can make physical backups easily.

Honest question, because it is interesting and might change how I approach backing up my passwords. How would you go about maintaing that physical copy updated?

What I think would make this approach hard is that you would have to ponder if a newly created account is important at creation time in order to know if you should update the off-site, physical copy of your most important passwords (I say this because if you want to backup everything and avoid the cloud entirely it is just not viable, having to update this physical backup for each new account. I am currently at over 400 logins in my pw manager, 2 years ago it was half as much).

I think having your passwords encrypted with a high enough entropy master password and a quantum-resistant encryption algorithm, and having an off-site, physical backup of your cloud account credentials is enough for anyone not publicly exposed, like a politician or someone extremely wealthy, even though I would be skeptical these people go through such lengths to protect their online accounts.

The lesson is not to "avoid" the cloud, but to not be "dependent" on it. Doubly so if the service provided is one that keeps you locked in and can not be ported over.

So yes, I feel comfortable with my strategy of having backups on bluray disks + S3. If AWS goes down or decides to jack up their prices to something unacceptable, I will take the physical copies and move then to the dozen others S3-compatible alternatives. I am not dependent on AWS.

But I am not interested in using Google Authenticator or Lastpass because that would mean that I am at their mercy.

LastPass is an issue - but even LastPass would let you export/print the passwords. So no hard dependency there*. Google Authenticator recently did something similar with QR codes.

* though OTP seeds don’t print, and you can’t export/print attachments. I don’t recommend LastPass for these and many other reasons.

With two usb sticks it’s not that much work to take one witha fresh backup to my mom when I visit and take the other one back and update that backup. At worst I lose one or two logins.