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Answers/The life queries

Where to keep passport and ID scans safely on your own computer

Passport, driver's licence, birth certificate, national ID — you want scans reachable from your laptop when you're booking a visa at midnight, and you want them unreadable to anyone else, forever. The pattern that works: originals in a physical safe or with a trusted person; scans in an encrypted folder on your machine; one copy of that folder on a USB stick, kept somewhere else.

Why 'attached to an email' or 'in a Notes app' is not enough

Email search history is forever, easy to breach, and shared with any device that reads your mail. Consumer notes apps sync in cleartext to the provider by default. A stolen phone is a data breach with a very small blast radius. An encrypted folder on your laptop is neither.

The setup

Scan at readable resolution. Store as one folder called 'ID' with clear filenames. Seal the folder with a file-vault tool. Copy the sealed bundle to a USB stick you keep at home or with family. That's it.

Elba is a single HTML file. Point it at your ID folder; it produces the sealed bundle. AES-256-GCM, no cloud, no account.

Questions people actually ask

Should I keep a paper copy too?
Yes — for the situations where the laptop is the thing you've lost.
What passphrase should I use?
Something you can remember unaided (four random words is plenty). Write it down and put it with the paper originals if the stakes are high.

Take the island

Elba is one HTML file. It runs locally in a Chromium browser, seals a folder with AES-256-GCM, never phones home, and becomes open source on 1 January 2030.

  1. €49MMXXVI· now ·
  2. €39MMXXVII2027
  3. €29MMXXVIII2028
  4. €19MMXXIX2029
  5. FreeMMXXX2030

the price falls each year · free to all 1 jan 2030

Take the island — €49
pay once · no account · nothing leaves

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