My password manager locked me out at the worst possible moment

Last Tuesday I was at a client site in Austin trying to finish a PCI compliance check and my password manager decided to force a master password change right in the middle of it. I panicked and typed the old one wrong three times, which triggered a 24-hour lockout. I ended up having to dig through 14 sticky notes in my car to get into my own backup vault. Has anyone else had a vault lock them out during an audit? I'm thinking about switching to a hardware key instead.

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1 Comment

the_william28d agoMost Upvoted

Hard disagree on the hardware key solving this. Those things die or get lost and then you're really locked out. The real issue is you had one point of failure. I keep a low tech backup like a paper list of critical passwords in a fire safe, and rotate it monthly. That's saved me twice when the manager glitched. Master password changes are annoying but they're the one thing you actually control.