Also you need to change passwords every so often, you're inviting disaster of the "holy holy holy fucking shit" variety if you start doing this and change every six months.
Happened to me relatively recently, actually. Had an encrypted machine that hadn't been rebooted in months. No backups (it's not production related, just a personal box, but still). Power outage hits. MFW when I can't remember the login after trying for an hour:
Happened to me too. I got this freebsd server, I use ssh keys to login. But I hadn't login for a while, so I couldn't remember the user's password (which gave access to 'root' via sudo). After 37 tries, I hit nailed it! I was that close from re-installing the system. It had automated backups so, no big deal... Just two-three hours (maybe more) would be lost.
If that was a Linux box, I would have booted into single user mode and changed the password. Or temporarily mounted the hard drive in a different machine and modified /etc/shadow directly. I assume you can do something similar in FreeBSD? Quicker then a re-install.
