A printed recovery sheet for the relatives I do tech support for

I am the person eleven relatives call when they cannot get into something, and over the years I had quietly become a single point of failure — my number was the recovery contact, my email was the backup, and nobody had any of the codes because I had kept them safe, meaning I had kept them where only I could find them. My uncle's phone was stolen while I was away, and it took four days of him being locked out of everything before I got home. That was the prompt. The insight, which is not mine, is that the right medium here is paper: relatives who are not comfortable with a password manager are entirely comfortable with a piece of paper in a drawer.

It is for a specific and unfashionable group: people who use two or three important accounts, do not want software, and have a family member doing their administration. It takes a list I maintain of accounts and recovery codes and lays them out as a single sheet per person, folded into a card, printed on my printer. The sheet says in plain language what each account is for, which phone number it is tied to, where the recovery codes are, and what to do first if they lose the phone. It also lists what I have access to and what I do not, which turned out to be the part people appreciated.

All of it, and it is small — a data file per person and a layout that produces a printable page. The work that was not obvious is the layout: I went through five versions before landing on something my aunt could read without glasses and would actually keep, which meant much larger type than felt reasonable, one account per block, and no colour because home printers lie about colour. I also wrote the bit that regenerates every sheet when I change anything, since the failure mode of paper is that it goes stale and nobody tells you.

The whole design rests on deciding this should be offline and paper rather than an app, which is the opposite of what my instincts said and is right for these users. Nothing syncs, nothing has an account, and the generator runs on my machine against a file I keep encrypted. I deliberately do not print full passwords on the sheet — it holds recovery codes and instructions, and the reasoning is that a sheet in a drawer at home has a different threat model from a sheet that has everything on it. I also decided to date every sheet in large type, so that an old one is obviously old.

The hardest part was not technical at all: deciding what belongs on paper. My first version printed everything, which made a genuinely dangerous object. My second printed so little it was useless. What settled it was going through each relative's actual situation — who lives alone, who shares a house, what would happen if the sheet were found — and accepting that the answer differs per person, so the generator takes a level per sheet. Explaining that trade-off to relatives in a way that did not frighten them took longer than writing the tool.

Eleven sheets, reprinted twice since 2024. My uncle has used his once, after a phone upgrade, and got himself back into two accounts without calling me, which is the entire point of the project. My cousin now maintains the sheets for her side of the family with a copy of the tool. The unexpected outcome is that writing the sheets forced me to actually audit what I had access to on other people's behalf, and I gave several of those back.

My aunt was the involuntary usability test for five layout versions and is the reason the type is the size it is.