It's simple. If you assume the real possibility of losing your digital account, then act like you'll lose it tomorrow. Adjust your life and move on. I don't care about digital accounts. I switch my main mail and phone every few years just for the sake of it. I avoid buying stuff bound to digital account. My accounts are disposable and have zero value other than nostalgic one.
I didn't lose a single account yet. I have printed backup codes, I have password manager, I have passwords backup in a text file on thumb drive, two copies. I have my domain held by registrar in my country, so I can just visit their office with my ID and talk with them. So I take some reasonable measures to protect myself. But I have no fear of losing those digital assets.
I actually gave a thought about protecting myself by creating a single 100% reliable email and then bind other accounts to that mail. Believe it or not: I didn't find any provider which would satisfy me. My worst case scenario: I'm going to jail for 20 years. Every free provider will delete my account after few years of inactivity. Paid providers usually are small enough so I wouldn't trust them anyway. My current plan is using my own domain with autopayment and enough balance on account. But of course that's not reliable. Registrar might just go bankrupt. And I can't really reserve my domain for 50 years no matter how much money would I pay.
> But of course that's not reliable. Registrar might just go bankrupt
If you registered a gTLD, you're theoretically safe from registrar bankruptcy, or even from a registrar losing all their data for whatever reason. Per the ICANN agreement, the registrars have to send a copy of their database to a third party escrow agent regularly (where I worked before we sent a differential backup everyday and a full backup once a week). This way, if the registrar cannot assume its role anymore, another registrar takes over.
Note that this is not true for ccTLDs (ie. every 2 character TLD). That's a reason you should prefer gTLDs if you want to prevent a worst case scenario. I usually recommend a .com or .net because Verisign is, in my opinion, the most reliable registry in the world. If you stick with .com/.net, you're safe from any registrar failure, and there's not a single chance that anything happens to the registry.
ccTLDs might have an emergency plan but it will depend on the registry. So if you really want a ccTLD:
- get familiar with the registry and its rules
- do NOT get the ccTLD of a country other than your own. Eligibility rules can change, so you could lose your domain if the registry decides that they now want to only sell to residents. British people lose eligibility over .eu for example, not because a change in eligibility rules, but because of a change in their own status.
- do NOT get the ccTLD of a small country, unless the registry delegates the technical stuff to a reliable registry backend. Small countries have crappy infrastructures, so DNS resolution could get unreliable. This famously happened to Notion.so (so -> Somalia) a little while ago.
I didn't lose a single account yet. I have printed backup codes, I have password manager, I have passwords backup in a text file on thumb drive, two copies. I have my domain held by registrar in my country, so I can just visit their office with my ID and talk with them. So I take some reasonable measures to protect myself. But I have no fear of losing those digital assets.
I actually gave a thought about protecting myself by creating a single 100% reliable email and then bind other accounts to that mail. Believe it or not: I didn't find any provider which would satisfy me. My worst case scenario: I'm going to jail for 20 years. Every free provider will delete my account after few years of inactivity. Paid providers usually are small enough so I wouldn't trust them anyway. My current plan is using my own domain with autopayment and enough balance on account. But of course that's not reliable. Registrar might just go bankrupt. And I can't really reserve my domain for 50 years no matter how much money would I pay.