Enigmail speed geeking

[Peter Lebbing]

On 12/03/15 20:17, Doug Barton wrote:
> Further, the inconvenience of having to deal with generating and
> socializing a new key if your smart card gets lost, becomes inoperable,
> etc. is way too high a cost for near-zero benefit.

And what if your hard drive holding your on-disk key crashes? Do you
also "socialize" a new key?

Of course not (I hope). You keep a backup of your key in a safe place.
This goes for smartcard keys as well. The situation is the same whether
you use a smartcard or not.

For signing subkeys, a backup isn't very necessary, not for on-disk keys
or for smartcard keys. But for your primary key and especially
encryption subkeys, this is important.

Not having a backup of your encryption subkeys means a not very robust
single point of failure, and if that hard disk crashes, or the file
system is corrupted, or your smartcard dies, you suddenly lose access to
all your encrypted files.

I cannot fathom why you would not have at the very least one backup of
your encryption subkey. It sounds like a phenomenally bad idea.

Peter.

-- 
I use the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) in combination with Enigmail.
You can send me encrypted mail if you want some privacy.
My key is available at <http://digitalbrains.com/2012/openpgp-key-peter>