October 11, 2009


I generated a gpg keypair for myself today, and I was looking for a fairly safe way to back it up. I don't particularly trust DVD/CDs, and keeping it on flash is even more worrying. I wanted a means of backup I can see and touch.

Paperbak would be great if it was ported to something not windows. Since it wasn't, I settled on QR Code.

Thus qrbackup was born. It will base32 encode a file, then encode it into QR codes using google chart service.

I have tested it from backup to restoration, and it works. YMMV, more instructions available after the jump.



P.S. Pardon my python.


  1. Why is flash not good enough? I thought flash was pretty reliable.

  2. @Thomas: if onboard controller fails, I don't know anyway of recovering the data without significant effort.

    Recoverying data from failed flash afaik is still very difficult.