Back Up Your Wallet

The default: hand-copy two or three sets, keep them in two different places, and store the passphrase separately.

The real goal of a backup

Your coins = 12/24 words + a passphrase

Complexity is the first enemy for most people, far bigger than the threat of hackers. In my experience, for most people a backup mainly defends against:

1. being casually seen by relatives and friends;
2. a single point of failure (the backup gets damp or damaged).

So don’t make the backup too complicated: copy the seed words into two or three notebooks and keep them in different places. For most people, that is already enough. Shamir backup does most people more harm than good — see On Shamir Backup.

Four iron rules

1. Seed words never touch the internet. Don’t print them (printers have caches and cloud sync), don’t photograph them, don’t screenshot them, don’t type them into any networked device.
2. Keep seed words and passphrase apart. The main lock is the seed words, and the passphrase is the secondary lock. Written together, it’s as if you only ever set one lock — but lose either one, and you permanently lose the coins.
3. Multiple copies, multiple places. Make two or three copies and keep them in different places. A single fire or burglary at home only costs you one of them.
4. Rehearse recovery. Human memory is unreliable. In the early days, restore your wallet from the backup once a month; later, once a year — otherwise, in time, you’ll forget how.

If your seed words were generated with dice and stored offline, the line of defense is already solid — there’s no need to design a passphrase so complex that you forget it. In that case, keeping the passphrase in a cloud note can be an acceptable trade-off. Some people would advise against it, but this is the advice I give friends; assess whether it suits your own situation. Whichever storage method you choose, don’t describe your actual storage habits in public.