Great, thanks everyone; much appreciated.

Thank you Dave.  I suppose what I should have said was: if I don't make a backup file from my ColdCard, then lose the ColdCard, must I have made the backup file to recover, or is retrieving my seed phrase enough?  The info I've seen on this is contradictory.

The ColdCard wallet can create a backup file of its configuration https://coldcard.com/docs/backups . Other than for cloning, why would you do this?  It would generate yet another passphrase to remember (and back up) and another sensitive file to keep up with.  I thought the whole point was that if you can simply remember/retrieve your 12-24 word seed phrase, you could recover your funds with any other wallet.  Am I missing something?

I ask because I recently read somewhere (can't find the link now) that with some hardware wallets, even if you know the BIP39 seed you still can lose funds if you need to recover and don't have a backup file from the wallet.  I'm kinda confused!

I'm all about properly archiving & securing my ColdCard's seed phrase, but I don't want to screw up by not making the backup file if it's really needed.  Again, for something other than cloning.

Like humblewrist, I too am a new Bitcoiner.  I studied BTC/crypto then decided on starting with a small amount of BTC on CoinBase, downloaded/verified Electrum, and bought a ColdCard MK3 wallet.  I successfully moved a few USD worth of BTC from CoinBase to a watch-only Electrum wallet.  So far so good.

Then I had the same question as humblewrist: how do I update the ColdCard offline wallet with received transactions?


So I think I get it.  Thus my next question: if my cold/offline wallet has no knowledge of transactions and is only an airgapped signing device, how is it that I can recover my Bitcoins from the 24 word seed phrase?  Wouldn't I have to have the Electrum watch-only wallet backed up as well?  Therefore losing the Electrum wallet to a hard drive crash or virus or whatever would leave me with no record of transactions, since they're not in the cold wallet.

In other words, I thought that if I used a cold storage wallet, I could lose my ColdCard AND completely lose my computer/files/Electrum wallets and still recover my BTC with only the BIP39 seed phrase.  True or no?  I feel certain I am misunderstanding.