Bitcoin Forum

Should I get my private key as i heard it is not the same as your seed just want to know incase i switch to another place like a exchange for some reason like electrum goes down or something?

and if yes how do i do that with a mac using electrum?

There is no need to save the private key for every address you have in your wallet. The backup seed is everything you need, since every address you own are derived from the seed.

Even if for some reason Electrum ever goes down, you can still use this seed to just import your wallet in a different wallet and recover your funds.

Except for the "minor" issue of Electrum seed mnemonics not being usable in any other wallet that I am aware of due to Electrum's use of non-BIP39 compatible seed mnemonics ::)

Try and put an Electrum seed into Ian Coleman's BIP39 Mnemonic Code Convertor (https://iancoleman.io/bip39/) :P

Also, as far as I'm aware, there is no easy way to "convert" an Electrum seed mnemonic into a BIP39 seed mnemonic... although, theoretically, it should be possible.

Fair enought... I missed that point. But I am fairly sure that someone smart enough would come with a tool to allow the sweep of your coins to another address or a way to convert your seed to an acceptable format.

Another point is that Electrum can't really "go down". Even if there is no Electrum servers to connect, you can always use any functional version to create transactions offline, sign, and broadcast to the network in any of the multiple "push transactions website" available (e.g: https://blockchain.info/pushtx). So I would say that you are safe to use Electrum.