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Harry asked: “I’m digitizing stuff over here. getting rid of all the paper at my house. One of the files I have on paper is all my passwords. Should I keep a paper copy of all those passwords or not, after I digitize those over? I have 14 pages of passwords to digitize over.”
Harry, 14 Pages worth of passwords is impressive. What’s the font size on that?
Ultimately, whether you keep the paper copy or not is up to you, but generally speaking there are ways to recover or replace your passwords for almost all services, if you’re the legitimate account holder. If you want to keep a hard copy anyway, remember that anyone who is literate can read your passwords, there’s no encryption on that piece of paper, so try to keep in a safe or somewhere that gives you some kind of added security.
It will be harder for you to lose your passwords than to lose a piece of paper
If you store your passwords in digital form somewhere with redundancy, be it a backup you make, or a cloud service that does it for you, the odds of anything going wrong are low, just remember that backing up is always a good idea.
It will be harder for you to lose your passwords than to lose a piece of paper, and it will be harder for others to read a piece of paper than it will be to decrypt a file and see the contents.
We wouldn’t suggest keeping the the physical paper, but given that you have 14 pages worth of physical paper, we understand it may be hard to shred, so at the very least keep it very safe if you absolutely have to keep it at all.