which information do I need to save to access bitcoins from different wallets?

[nikhil0416]

Newbie question:

I just stored my first purchase using mSigna wallet by connecting to a remote node. I had to enter a long sentence when I created a new wallet in mSigna. I have saved this sentence in a text file on my portable drive.

My question is if for some reason mSigna software stops working in the future, would I be able to access my bitcoins using a different wallet software as long as I have that sentence saved?

I played with mSigna little bit on my own and I see that it has options to export public and private keys to a file. Is the format of these exported files proprietary to mSigna?

Even though I don't have answers to the above questions, I have backed up the "keyphrase sentence" and the exported public and private key files to a portable drive. Would this be sufficient to be able to access my bitcoins from any wallets in the future? If not, what do I need to do to be able to do so?

Thanks

[pooya87]

if you have the private keys you can import them in almost all other bitcoin wallets and have access to your funds. (private keys are strings starting with 5 or K or L). this is like the universal thing that you can use anywhere.

that "long sentence" that you are talking about which is a set of words is probably your Seed. since mSignia uses BIP32 and it is open source, you can always use another tool or wallet to recover all your private keys that you have ever used.