Announcing paperbackup.py to backup keys as QR codes on paper

[Thomas Jarosch]

Hi Peter,

On Wednesday, 22 February 2017 13:56:22 CET Peter Lebbing wrote:
> Oh, as an aside, the advantage of paperkey is that it is
> self-describing. 

I've tried paperkey with Gnupg 2.1.13 and it had trouble parsing the secret 
key data. May be the internal packet format changed or needs adaption.
When I think about long term storage, I'd rather rely on the full data
instead of a snippet of the openpgp packets.

The argument about re-downloading the public key from the keyservers is valid 
though, but for the secret key a full backup is preferred in our use case.
It's easy for the user to skip the public key backup.

Also if the QR code scanning ever fails: There is base64 encoded text output
at the end, too. That could be OCRed or typed in by hand if ever needed.
(we use paperbackup.py just as additional backup)

You can even use paperbackup.py to back up your ssh key :)

Cheers,
Thomas