I have 350 items in my BW vault. I am not memorizing that many passwords, I'd rather use my brain for something else.

I encourage you to think critically about this and re-evaluate your decision. I would say that for at least 99.99% of people a password manager is significantly more secure overall.

• Browser-integrated password managers will avoid filling your password into the wrong site. This is a great barrier to phishing.
• Allows a unique password per-site which greatly mitigates the problem of password leaks which are fairly common.
• Allows you to use much stronger passwords than you can memorize.
• It's quite convenient to just click "login".

For most people phishing is a far bigger risk than some malware stealing their local password databases. To make database theft even less of a concern most password managers have the option to encrypt the local database file. This means that to steal your passwords the malware will need to extract the encryption key from the password manager process which can often be configured to forget the key quickly after the last use.

Also consider that if you have malware that can steal your password database and the encryption key it can probably just keylog all your passwords or steal your browser's cookie jar. So the extra barrier here is minimal.

I think you are right to be suspicious of having a vault of passwords "ready to steal" but in practice the upsides far outweigh the downsides, especially if you make a security-focused choice of password manager.

I've been using keepassxc for a while now and it's better than most other options, everything is stored locally and encrypted behind a master password.

All you micht want to do is make a backup of your vault onto an external drive (best practice would be encrypted via the options you have, I use luks because I'm a Linux nerd).

I'm in the same boat at this point, partly just because I'm not sure how I want to partition things and if the software will work together the way I want.

I assume password managers themselves store things encrypted until you unlock them with whatever master password.

I've got 1601 logins and 86 secure notes in my Bitwarden vault... no way I'm memorizing all of that lol