Quote from: ixne on August 03, 2014, 03:29:19 PM

I keep a significant portion of my bitcoins on an encrypted ironkey usb drive stored in a security deposit box and stored in a zip lock bag (in case of vault flooding, which was an issue in Manhattan after hurricane Sandy, although the ironkeys are very well contructed and would probably work after a year or more underwater). The ironkey uses hardware-based encryption and automatically erases and disables the drive after 10 wrong password attempts, so brute force isn't an option. The file on the drive is itself is encrypted with a password in combination with a keyfile that I don't keep anywhere near the bank. I have an encrypted copy stored within a personal ironkey, also using keyfiles that I do not keep locally or anywhere that the drive itself routinely travels to or gets used.

Just remember, you're much more likely to lose coins than have them stolen (i.e., forgotten password, hard drive failure, house fire, ruined paper wallet). For that reason I always make sure I have 2 working copies which are physically separated. I also have redundancies for the keyfiles, which are necessary to recover the wallets, but its easy to keep copies of those in various places since they by themselves are not valuable to anyone. The keyfiles are not labeled as such, obviously (you can use any kind of file).

I wouldn't keep a full list of keys, you should just extract a private key from a zeroed address so that no one who finds those encrypted keys will be able to access your Bitcoin (He if the odds of this happening are very slim) Instead they will only be able to access the blank address. You can still find the password from that encrypted key as long as you know enough of it or have a good idea what it could be. So it would be accessible by you if you ever forget your password but, know what it could be. Whoever, else will just have access to the blank address and nothing else.

For anyone considering this option of using a encrypted storage device:

What you could of done before you stored it in the encrypted storage drive and set the password to the encrypted storage device is made the password the same as your Bitcoin wallet encrypted password. Extracted a private key which belongs to a zeroed address then it would be possible to find that password without affecting the storage device. Of course, that means the wallet and storage device would need the same password which could be a security flaw, however not everyone would know how to apply the script to the private key &/or know that encrypted key would be the password to the storage device.

Of course, this requires that you know most of the password, so if anyone did find the private key they would need to know most of the password anyway to even try to bruteforce it. Don't get me wrong, there are far more secure ways to store your Bitcoin but, if you insist on using a encrypted usb then this is probably the best way to go about it.