At some point a thing on your list stops deserving its place. A passphrase you suspect. An address that has not worked in months. A key you generated on a machine you have since stopped trusting. The item has not disappeared, and that is the difficulty. It sits there looking exactly as usable as it did last year.
Retiring it properly takes about two minutes and prevents a specific failure: reaching for something in a hurry, finding it, and using it without remembering why you had doubts.
Mark it before you remove it
The instinct is to delete. Deleting leaves no trace of the decision, so in three months you will find the same string somewhere else, have no memory of the doubt, and put it straight back into use.
Write the word retired next to it, with the date and a handful of words about why. Keep that line for a while. It costs one line of storage and it turns a silent hole into a note that answers the question you will inevitably ask yourself later.
- Mark the item retired where it lives, with the date and the reason in a few plain words.
- Ask what else leaned on it. A retired key affects everything it signed. A retired passphrase affects anything protected by the same one, which is an argument for never having reused it.
- Acquire the replacement before you destroy the original, if the item can be replaced at all.
- Only then remove the old copies, all of them, including the ones on the second disk and the piece of paper you forgot about.
Items that cannot simply be replaced
Some things are not reissuable. Recovery material handed out once at signup does not come again on request, and a market that could reissue it on demand would be a market where anyone else could ask too. If material like that is compromised, the honest position is that the account is compromised, and the useful response is at the account level rather than the item level.
This is exactly where an account somewhere else that already exists stops being a theoretical nicety. The value of a spare is that it was acquired while you were calm.
Retiring an address
An address that stops answering is not automatically retired. This site cannot tell you why a given awazon market link fails to load, since it runs no checks at all, and the fault may be your own client, your network, or the far end. Silence is not evidence.
What justifies retirement is a positive signal from somewhere else, ideally a signed notice you can check. Failing that, a string that has been dead for a long stretch and appears nowhere in a fresh collection can be moved to a retired line rather than deleted, which keeps you from re-adding it the next time you see it quoted somewhere old.
The habit that makes this easy
A retired section at the bottom of wherever you keep this material solves most of it. Things move down there, they keep their dates, and they stop cluttering the part of the list you actually read. Once a year the retired section can be cleared out entirely, at which point the reasons have stopped being interesting.
The point is never tidiness. It is that a doubt you had once should still be available to you the next time the same string turns up, because it will turn up, and you will not remember on your own.
Questions that come up
Should I shred paper copies or is deleting the file enough?
If the paper carried something that unlocks money or an account, destroy it properly rather than binning it. If it carried a public address or a fingerprint, it was never secret and the only reason to remove it is to stop yourself using a stale copy by accident.
What if I am not sure whether something is compromised?
Treat uncertainty as a reason to replace anything that is cheap to replace, and as a reason to think hard about anything that is not. Replacing a passphrase costs a few minutes. Deciding an account is finished costs a great deal more, so it deserves better evidence than a bad feeling.