- What it is
- A written copy of a published address other than the one you have been using, held with the date you wrote it.
- How you get one
- You copy it from the same published source your existing address came from, at a moment when nothing is wrong.
- Where to keep it
- With your address file, in the same handwriting or the same plain file, under a date of its own.
- How it goes wrong
- It ages silently, because published sets change and a written line gives no sign that it has been superseded.
- What fails without it
- Losing one address leaves you with nothing written, and searching for a replacement in that state is how people get caught out.
- Time to acquire
- Under a minute of copying, done on an ordinary day when writing a second line feels completely unnecessary.
Spare does not mean lesser
The word is doing a job here and it is easy to misread. A spare address is not a fallback, a lower tier or a second choice. Published sets do not come with a ranking and this site does not apply one. The addresses page prints what has been published, in the order supplied, without labels.
What makes an address a spare is your usage, not its nature. It is the one you have not been typing. If you switched, it would become the one you type and the other would become the spare. Nothing about the addresses themselves changes.
The failure this prevents
The bad situation is specific. The address you have been using stops working for you, for whatever reason, and you have nothing else written down. Now you need to find an address, and you need to find it while feeling some urgency, and urgency is the condition under which people accept the first thing a search engine hands them.
That is the moment when a wrong address is most likely to be adopted, because the normal checks feel like an obstacle between you and getting back in. Holding a second one in writing removes the urgency entirely, and removing the urgency is the whole benefit. It is not that the spare is guaranteed to work. It is that you are not shopping.
Copying it properly
- Take it from the same published source your existing address came from, not from a different one you happened to find.
- Write it the way you wrote the first, so both lines look alike and neither looks more official than the other.
- Put the date on it, following dates, because a line with no date cannot be judged later.
- Read it back against the source once, character by character, rather than trusting the shape.
- Do not mark one as preferred, and do not put them in an order that implies one.
Why the line goes stale
Published sets are not permanent. Addresses are added, addresses drop out of publication, and none of that reaches a line of writing in your notebook. The line will look exactly as convincing on the day it stops being current as it did on the day you wrote it, which is the whole problem with written addresses and the reason for the date beside it.
Judging staleness is a matter of how old the line is against how much has changed, and that is a judgement, not a measurement. An address written down last week and an address written down last year are not equally worth typing, even though they look identical on the page.
How this differs from the address file
The address file is the artifact. This page is about it having more than one line in it. The last good address covers something different again, which is a record of what you used and when rather than a list of what exists. People often hold one of the three and assume they have all of them.
For the reasoning about which places are worth copying awazon mirrors from at all, see independent sources. For where a written line physically belongs, where things live.
Questions that come up
How many addresses should I have written down?
More than one, which is the point of the page, and no particular figure beyond that. What matters is that every line you hold came from a source you would defend and carries a date. A long list copied from wherever is worse than two lines you can account for, because it gives you more chances to type something you cannot vouch for.
Does having a spare mean I can get in if the other stops working?
No, and this site will not suggest it. Nothing here knows the state of any address, including the ones on the addresses page. What holding a second written line does is remove the need to go searching under pressure. Whether it answers is outside what this site checks or claims.
Should I keep the spare somewhere separate?
No. Keep both lines together, in the same file, written the same way, under the same date. Splitting them across two places creates the possibility of reaching one and not the other, which reintroduces exactly the situation the spare exists to prevent.