How Mat Honan recovered from his hacking →
Mostly good news.
His password-deadlock scenario is worth noting:
My Dropbox password was itself a 1Password-generated litany of nonsense. Without access to Dropbox, I couldn’t get my [1Password] keychain. Without my keychain, I couldn’t get into Dropbox.
My email and Dropbox passwords are both unmemorized 1Password gibberish. To prevent this scenario when I started using 1Password, I printed these two passwords onto two different pieces of paper, unlabeled and inconspicuous, and hid them in safe places.
From a clean install, with access to my email and Dropbox, I can get 1Password up and running to unlock everything else I need. (In theory, I could just do this for the Dropbox password, but it makes me feel more comfortable to have emergency email access, too.)
If you use 1Password or similar password generators, evaluate your contingency plan: if all of your computers and devices were stolen, destroyed, or rendered inoperable suddenly, and you had to start fresh from a completely clean setup, can you get through your own security measures?
This is especially important for data-encryption passwords and keys, since there usually isn’t a customer-service department you can call to reset those.