How hard is it really to, upon boot of a physical local storage server,
to remember to concatenate 12'th line of the 12'th page of the first
12 books on your bookshelf?
Or to at least write the fucker down so that phrase remains
airgapped (though obviously final key still present in core)?
I'd first need a stable bookshelf. Housing has been in flux somewhat - for a while now. I may have written something down. Somewhere. Also, I thought I would remember, and did, until I did not use the password for some months (it was running smoothly and needed no reboots). So, harder than it seemed. I have also used grids and patterns to hide passwords, so not every onlooker would immediately see them - but it's possible to brute force them so there's no real comfort.
Sorry for always being so verbose. Brevity kills clarity.