cyphar / paperback

Paper backup generator suitable for long-term storage.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Dumb proofing #15

Open jobs62 opened 2 years ago

jobs62 commented 2 years ago

Hi,

I was evaluating paperback for future use when i passed by some issues will trying to recover a document (a private rsa ssh key, whatever).

the document is spread on 3 qr-code. Each time i tried to recover i have been grated with a Error: failed to parse data after inputting the main document. I tried to input them differently, one by one, or concatenate everything first in a text file. It worked with a "small" file so i still convicted that i did something wrong on my part which lead me to the next thinking.

Whould it be nice to attach to the main document a notice page for dummies, untechsavy, not even born yet person (it supposed to be long term strorage after all, github may not event exist when someone will try to recover) ? Also could be a good idea to have some metadata in each qrcode to be able to guide the user through the process (for things like out of order input, partial input, or even add parity qrcode in case of damage of the main docuement) ?

best regards,

ps: as i dev, i know it's the worst kind of ticket, but i had to do it ;)

cyphar commented 2 years ago

We do handle out of order QR codes for the main document (there's a tag indicating how many there are and which one it is in the list), as for the other stuff I agree that this should be done and I did have that before but this causes issues with checksums -- the checksum representation completely changes when you add a prefix which means that the document ID is now a bit uglier to compute and is now tied to the QR encoding format.

I did have an issue open about this in #12 but as I mention there the document id is a fairly big concern... I'd appreciate any ideas on how to solve that problem (or assurances that it doesn't matter).

cyphar commented 2 years ago

Also in the future there will be a graphical interface that would show you with diagrams which part of which document you are being asked to scan. I completely agree the current UX is awful for regular people.

cyphar commented 2 years ago

I mentioned parity and other such topics in #6.