Ask HN: Does anyone use an alternative to a password manager?

As time goes on I find myself, both in my professional and my personal life, adding more and more usernames and passwords I need to remember. I have over a 100 accounts I need to keep track of and access typically access at a whim.

Since it's insecure to both use the same password over and over or to modify a single password per service (e.g. appending "fb" or "tw" etc to a password when using a different service) I have found that a password manager is literally the only thing working for me.

However, as break-ins become more and more frequent, I am concerned that my single point of failure, my password manager, could become compromised. I mean it seems almost inevitable, right? An attacker wouldn't even need to compromise the service or app you're using but your phone instead to gather the same data.

So I'm curious to those of you who use something other than a typically password manager: what do you use and has it been successful or a pain?

I'd suggest this.

http://ssl.masterpasswordapp.com/

Similar setup, MacPass (a new implementation of keepass for the mac), ChromePass for autologins, and KeePass2Android on my phone. Works well, not perfect but enough for what I want.

I have a file on the local drive of my office computer and a sheet of paper near my home computer (used by me and my wife). When the sheet of paper is full of handwriting, I bring it to office to synchronize both list.. When my house has been robbed last year they have not found the sheet, but if they had, I could have changed all passwords very quickly. In case of fire, the backup is safe in a remote location. It is easy to carry, duplicate or destroy. The security at office is ensure by the IT service. This may be imperfect, but I think my list of password would not be the main target of an attack. At home, my wife is often present and would quickly notice if a burglar steal the list. When I go on holidays, I take the home list with me. I think it is quite successful.

If your PC is compromised it's pretty much game over, using a password manager does not really worsen the damage in that scenario At that level of compromise they can probably add a root cert, MITM your connections, and grab your passwords anyway.

If you're concerned, you could use separate files for different levels of security, which would give you the theoretical ability to compartmentalize the loss. But again, if you're compromised to that extent it's game over, there is nothing you can do that will allow you to operate securely on untrusted hardware/OS, you simply can't let that happen.

It's not like that's an unreasonable goal, the combination of Ublock Origin, Windows Defender, and common sense have kept my systems clean for 10 years now.