I've considered truecrypt but what about in the worst case? How do you keep the keys safely accessible without being accessible to an unauthorized person? What if you crazily forgot them? Everything's gone!
Depends. If I'm using a password I'll make a sequence that only makes sense to me, something with different connection to things, events, etc around me so I'll always have something to remember it by, even if the actual passphrase has nothing intelligible in any language. Then one can apply various scrambling - uppercase, lowercase, with a certain frequency, while replacing some letters with their close resembling numerals (i - 1, o - 0, etc). After using it for awhile you remember it well. And it case you forget it your brain has enough clues to reconstruct it.
Sure you can use keyfiles (and back 'em up), hidden volumes and combinations of all these to make everything even more complex.
The problem with Trucrypt is actually RAID. If you create volumes you have to mount them, hence many letters. Plus you can't create a super-sized volume for many reasons, including the adverse probability that past a certain size, considering that everything is encrypted with the same key, the whole construct becomes too weak, mathematically exposed to brute force and the likes (as far as I understand the theory).
On the funny side, if we're all afraid to lose passwords we wouldn't encrypt anything
.