Keeping or recovering seed phrases during or after a natural disaster.

[Ultegra134]

I know that the security of our wallet is very important that is why it should be personal. I have heard of saving encrypted seed phrases in the cloud or online personal files. I know this is also risky but is there any means of saving my seed phrase safe from these natural disasters? That could atleast give a Bitcoiner access to a wallet after the loss of seed phrases during or after natural disasters.

It's a big concern if you only have one copy of your seed phrase, Our country has a lot of disasters, we have typhoons, floods, fires, and earthquakes and we have in our location what our experts call the Big One which happens every 100 years and it could happen anytime.

So I'm preparing for this I have three copies of my seed phrase stored on our farms and our ancestral home It is well kept and it's coded in case there is intrusion he'll have a hard time figuring it all out, having two or three secured and well-kept copies in different places is important you just never know when calamities and disaster happens.

Well, I understand your concern regarding the safety of your seed phrase due to natural disasters, but honestly, supposing that a fire similar to the one in Lahaina occurred, the seed phrase wouldn't be the first to think of saving your life. In my opinion, in such extreme disasters, there are limited options in terms of what you can do to save a seed phrase that has been physically stored. Piece of paper? What are you going to find if your house has burned, collapsed, or been swept away by a flood? Probably nothing. The only thing that would still be standing is storing it online, but such an option poses other risks.

[abel1337]

Backing it up would be the solution. I have a multiple backup of my seed phrase that only I myself know. Storing it in different location is a necessary thing to do. One example on where you can store it is on a safe, accessible and has a person that currently guarding the place like your parents house. It is a way to have a back up seed phrase incase a natural disaster happen in the place where you store your seed phrase.

We also need to get ready in case there's another disaster like being a victim of an accident or being diseased. Putting instructions on how to use your wallet on your safe place would be ideal. I personally store this kind of instruction on places that can be retrieved if I'm not in this world anymore. Putting extra security like hiding your seed phrase somewhere separate in the house and giving clue to the instructions on how to find it would be fun, it's like a hide and seek.

[Pokapoka124]

I know that the security of our wallet is very important that is why it should be personal. I have heard of saving encrypted seed phrases in the cloud or online personal files. I know this is also risky but is there any means of saving my seed phrase safe from these natural disasters? That could atleast give a Bitcoiner access to a wallet after the loss of seed phrases during or after natural disasters.

Storing one’s seed phrase in the cloud or any online computer is not safe. The internet is a vulnerable place and almost everything online can be compromised. The risk of storing one’s seed phrase online is too great. I think the best option in this case is to have multiple locations (if possible different cities) where you hide the metal with your engraved seed phrase.

[nelson4lov]

~Snipped

To prevent this case, that's why I always bought my seed phrase wherever I go in an unexpected media e.g. concealing in a book

Interesting idea but it depends on the location because in neighborhood with high crime rate, your chances of losing your seed phrase to thief or criminal is very high compared to a natural disaster. Moving around a lot with the seed phrase increases the chances of losing the seed phrase.

Well, there is no one-size-fits-all solution so just being proactive might be the best approach to situations like that if they occur in the future.

[lionheart78]

I know that the security of our wallet is very important that is why it should be personal. I have heard of saving encrypted seed phrases in the cloud or online personal files. I know this is also risky but is there any means of saving my seed phrase safe from these natural disasters? That could atleast give a Bitcoiner access to a wallet after the loss of seed phrases during or after natural disasters.

Saving our seed phrases even though it is encrypted is also prone to hacking.  I believe there are procedures in saving our seed phrases resistant to natural disasters, such as putting the file in a case that is both water, fire-resistant, and rust-resistant and then borrowing it underground.  It is a simple process but very effective in preventing natural disaster from destroying the item where our seed phrases is stored.

[Aikidoka]

To be honest, I don't have a clear idea of how to secure or recover seed phrases in the event of a major disaster affecting a country. Perhaps the best approach is to either memorize your seed phrase or store it in multiple geographically separate locations, such as different cities. That way if a disaster happens on one city, the seed phrase stored in another city would remain unaffected giving you at least one additional copy.

This is the idea that comes to mind at the moment,but I'm interested in reading more of the replies here to see if there are better solutions available.

[The Cryptovator]

The only solution is memorization of the seed phrase, which is quite hard, or writing your seed phrase on multiple pieces of paper and saving it in multiple places. So even if you destroy one, you can recover it through another seed phrase. But the condition is that the places should be super secure; otherwise, risk is still involved. I think the second option would be easier for us. We have to identify the super-secure places and take steps before any incidents happen. 

[Quidat]

The only solution is memorization of the seed phrase, which is quite hard, or writing your seed phrase on multiple pieces of paper and saving it in multiple places. So even if you destroy one, you can recover it through another seed phrase. But the condition is that the places should be super secure; otherwise, risk is still involved. I think the second option would be easier for us. We have to identify the super-secure places and take steps before any incidents happen. 

Private key could be;

256 character long binary code
64 digit hexadecimal code
QR code
Mnemonic phrase

but most like we would really be having playing that common 64-character and its not something so simple that could really be that
easily memorize.Yes, its possible but chance or risks on forgetting those characters in due time is high and we know that one false character would really be entirely mess up your funds
since wallet cant really accessed anymore.This is why it would really be that preferred for those keys to be stored up into those traditional or common way
despite on having that risks on natural disasters and other possible factors. Even myself would definitely be stacking it up through those ways and methods and the only
last option would be those memorizing but i dont see for me on doing it.

[Z-tight]

PS: BTW what are your plans?

My plan is to do things the way i've always done, either write my seed phrase on paper or engrave it on steel and provide multiple backups in more than one location, i am not using the cloud, any online service or anything that is not recommended to mitigate the possibility of a natural disaster. Too many of these solutions only provide a false sense of security and you're increasing your chances of losing your BTC's before you're ever affected by a natural disaster.

The only solution is memorization of the seed phrase

Do not ever memorize your seed phrase, doing so puts you in more danger of losing your funds than natural disasters. Too many people also get head or brain injury, stroke and other illness that can make them lose their memory.

[Rengga Jati]

I know that the security of our wallet is very important that is why it should be personal. I have heard of saving encrypted seed phrases in the cloud or online personal files. I know this is also risky but is there any means of saving my seed phrase safe from these natural disasters? That could atleast give a Bitcoiner access to a wallet after the loss of seed phrases during or after natural disasters.

This is certainly something that was beyond all of our expectations and no one expected such a natural disaster to occur. However, this always happens suddenly. Be grateful if this happened after there was prior warning from the authorities regarding the disaster. So we can still save our assets. However, if this happens suddenly and we cannot save our assets, then we must be prepared for the consequences. In this case, regarding seed phrases or other important information and data regarding crypto assets, everything will have risks. Personally, I have several offline and online backups. Of course, going online will be very dangerous because it is vulnerable to cyber crime. Therefore I chose it for few assets. Meanwhile for offline ones, I will pay more attention to storage locations that can be carried easily and are always close to us

[cafter]

I wish mercy and acceptance to everyone who lost a life in these disasters, and I extend my condolences to their families and a speedy recovery to the injured.

You can solve this problem by using a multi-signature wallet. Approximately 2 out of 4 would be ideal, and you can do the following:

• Encrypt one of these private keys and place it in a secure cloud account, so that even if it is hacked, the hackers still need a second key.
• Store the second seeds in metal and keep them in a safe place in your home.
• Encrypt the third in the form of a hardware wallet and keep it in a secured bank vault somewhere else relatively far from your location.
• Encrypt the last key and keep it in another state or another country.

add more keys as needed, but keep all scenarios in mind and then start developing solutions using multi-signature wallets based on that.

I have some suggestions to improve this idea a little bit.
telling someone about your bitcoin will be important and "riskier" because if the owner died in that natural event who will recover the coins?
here one backup will be at other country/state/city but what about other 3 backups they are kept in one city(what if natural disaster destroyed that city where the three backups are?)
//like your bank locker will be in your city,
//your metal plate will be in your city(which don't have risk of being destroyed but have risk of being stolen or lost)
//if your passwords for cloud account are written on paper and kept at your home(which is in your city)

[blockman]

Do not ever memorize your seed phrase, doing so puts you in more danger of losing your funds than natural disasters. Too many people also get head or brain injury, stroke and other illness that can make them lose their memory.

I remember someone said that through the forum and that's his only way of keeping his seed phrases. I just hope that it was just a joke or if it's real, the amount wasn't that much. I'll never do this, my memory isn't as great as when I was younger and we're all growing old. You'll never know if your mind is still sharp the next day whether you're healthy living or not, there will be a point in our lives that our minds won't be sharp anymore. And that's true about you'll never know what may happen the next day if you'll stumble upon a wall that will hit your head unknowingly. It's just hard to do this and even I've got the best memory shape, I'll not trust that fact because as we age, there are functions that won't be perfect as they used to be.

[hatshepsut93]

My problem is that these natural disasters happen without warning signs. Recently we just woke up to see that our entire neighborhood has been flooded because of the collapse of a dam in the neighboring country. The earthquake in Turkey, Syria, and Morocco,  and the flood in Libya were impromptu and everyone was only concerned about saving lives and nobody cared about personal belongings like seed phrases. The destruction caused by these disasters is so widespread that it could destroy all the safe places where you safely kept your seed phrase. Recovering these seed phrases saved on disaster-proof materials after a natural disaster is somehow difficult because recovering them with machines like escalators and other earth-moving machines will be close to impossible. In the case of flooding, these materials would have been washed away into rivers or sea.  

This is why I memorized my seed, even though it's the most unreliable storage method, but it's always with me. For long term I rely on paper backups and USB sticks, but for the short term risk of all backups being lost I have my memory. This is far from ideal but a lot better than nothing.

[nakamura12]

I wish mercy and acceptance to everyone who lost a life in these disasters, and I extend my condolences to their families and a speedy recovery to the injured.

You can solve this problem by using a multi-signature wallet. Approximately 2 out of 4 would be ideal, and you can do the following:

• Encrypt one of these private keys and place it in a secure cloud account, so that even if it is hacked, the hackers still need a second key.
• Store the second seeds in metal and keep them in a safe place in your home.
• Encrypt the third in the form of a hardware wallet and keep it in a secured bank vault somewhere else relatively far from your location.
• Encrypt the last key and keep it in another state or another country.

add more keys as needed, but keep all scenarios in mind and then start developing solutions using multi-signature wallets based on that.

If it's seed phrase then I think it's possible to even make it more secured if the seed phrase is divided like half of of the words is encrypted and the other is also encrypted then store it in cloud therefore even if they did get past the encryption but they wouldn't still be able to access the wallet without out the rest of the seed phrase. Other than that is having backup in multiple locations just like the others explaination about having backup in more than one place.

[Mr.suevie]

Do not ever memorize your seed phrase, doing so puts you in more danger of losing your funds than natural disasters. Too many people also get head or brain injury, stroke and other illness that can make them lose their memory.

I remember someone said that through the forum and that's his only way of keeping his seed phrases. I just hope that it was just a joke or if it's real, the amount wasn't that much. I'll never do this, my memory isn't as great as when I was younger and we're all growing old. You'll never know if your mind is still sharp the next day whether you're healthy living or not, there will be a point in our lives that our minds won't be sharp anymore. And that's true about you'll never know what may happen the next day if you'll stumble upon a wall that will hit your head unknowingly. It's just hard to do this and even I've got the best memory shape, I'll not trust that fact because as we age, there are functions that won't be perfect as they used to be.

Even if you are good with remembering stuffs and your memory is shape it's still wouldn't be advisable to actually save your seed phrase up in your memory as it's unethical to do so because as others have clearly pointed out we most surely forget because you are human so rather than memorising your phrase better just to put down in writing or buy some seed phrase saving device like the metal seed phrase storer which can survive so many wether and conditions.

[xSkylarx]

Do not ever memorize your seed phrase, doing so puts you in more danger of losing your funds than natural disasters. Too many people also get head or brain injury, stroke and other illness that can make them lose their memory.

I remember someone said that through the forum and that's his only way of keeping his seed phrases. I just hope that it was just a joke or if it's real, the amount wasn't that much. I'll never do this, my memory isn't as great as when I was younger and we're all growing old. You'll never know if your mind is still sharp the next day whether you're healthy living or not, there will be a point in our lives that our minds won't be sharp anymore. And that's true about you'll never know what may happen the next day if you'll stumble upon a wall that will hit your head unknowingly. It's just hard to do this and even I've got the best memory shape, I'll not trust that fact because as we age, there are functions that won't be perfect as they used to be.

Even if you are good with remembering stuffs and your memory is shape it's still wouldn't be advisable to actually save your seed phrase up in your memory as it's unethical to do so because as others have clearly pointed out we most surely forget because you are human so rather than memorising your phrase better just to put down in writing or buy some seed phrase saving device like the metal seed phrase storer which can survive so many wether and conditions.

Even with your password you will forget how much more the seed phrase? One of the disadvantages is that if you are getting old you'll surely forget it. I've also read somewhere in the forum that he made a lyric of music of his seed phrase which is creative but if that was on paper it is still possible that it got destroyed unless you've engraved it into steel plate.

What is best is having a safe or vault in your house or having multiple of it where you store your seed phrase along with your essential documents that are safe from flood and fireproof. Only problem really is when it will be swept away by the flood which you can't track where it goes unless it has a tracker.

[posi]

Do not ever memorize your seed phrase, doing so puts you in more danger of losing your funds than natural disasters. Too many people also get head or brain injury, stroke and other illness that can make them lose their memory.

I remember someone said that through the forum and that's his only way of keeping his seed phrases. I just hope that it was just a joke or if it's real, the amount wasn't that much. I'll never do this, my memory isn't as great as when I was younger and we're all growing old. You'll never know if your mind is still sharp the next day whether you're healthy living or not, there will be a point in our lives that our minds won't be sharp anymore. And that's true about you'll never know what may happen the next day if you'll stumble upon a wall that will hit your head unknowingly. It's just hard to do this and even I've got the best memory shape, I'll not trust that fact because as we age, there are functions that won't be perfect as they used to be.

Even if you are good with remembering stuffs and your memory is shape it's still wouldn't be advisable to actually save your seed phrase up in your memory as it's unethical to do so because as others have clearly pointed out we most surely forget because you are human so rather than memorising your phrase better just to put down in writing or buy some seed phrase saving device like the metal seed phrase storer which can survive so many wether and conditions.

Even with your password you will forget how much more the seed phrase? One of the disadvantages is that if you are getting old you'll surely forget it. I've also read somewhere in the forum that he made a lyric of music of his seed phrase which is creative but if that was on paper it is still possible that it got destroyed unless you've engraved it into steel plate.

What is best is having a safe or vault in your house or having multiple of it where you store your seed phrase along with your essential documents that are safe from flood and fireproof. Only problem really is when it will be swept away by the flood which you can't track where it goes unless it has a tracker.

As the OP also mentioned, storing seed phrases on a physical device also has risks, in a fire or flood you can find them again, but if it is a natural disaster or an earthquake that causes large landslides finding the safe is also extremely difficult. Each method has advantages and disadvantages, so depending on the geographical conditions where we live, we use the most suitable methods. Diversifying storage methods is also an effective measure. I still use the traditional way of writing them down in a notebook and I also share these secrets with my wife and she also has her own way of keeping them.

[karabiber]

Hardware wallets, notes written on paper, seeds stored in special safes at home. You can lose all this very quickly due to natural disasters. The only thing you can do is to increase the storage space. If you have houses in different cities or if your parents live there, you can store your seeds there or you can do the healthiest thing and rent physical safes in banks and distribute your seeds to your safes in banks in more than one city. I never thought i would use banks in this way for security reasons

But with the recent disasters we have experienced, we may think that the best thing would be to divide the seeds and distribute them to different places rather than storing them in one place. The safest method i can think of is to store the seeds in bank vaults in different cities and store them in more than one place rather than in one place.

[wiss19]

Encrypting your seed phrase and storing it in a cloud storage that you trust and you know isn't going anywhere very soon, like Google Drive, isn't really a bad idea considering it won't be vulnerable to getting lost forever due to natural disasters that you've mentioned because as you said, they don't come after a warning and even if you get a warning sometimes, you will still not be able to actually do something about your seed phrases that quick.

If you have them encrypted and stored somewhere safe online, you won't need to worry about them at all if, unfortunately, you had to go through something tragic like your house getting washed out by flood or earthquake hitting it really hard and the only thing that might survive is you.

[spectre71]

Encrypting your seed phrase and storing it in a cloud storage that you trust and you know isn't going anywhere very soon, like Google Drive, isn't really a bad idea considering it won't be vulnerable to getting lost forever due to natural disasters that you've mentioned because as you said, they don't come after a warning and even if you get a warning sometimes, you will still not be able to actually do something about your seed phrases that quick.

If you have them encrypted and stored somewhere safe online, you won't need to worry about them at all if, unfortunately, you had to go through something tragic like your house getting washed out by flood or earthquake hitting it really hard and the only thing that might survive is you.

I have been thinking about this exercise for a bit. The worst situation is me losing it physically or access like "hey the house you yous stashed in foreclosed" Encrypted file on a service seems like a great idea. These services do all the hard work for you, multiple redundant locations, back ups and I can log in anywhere and retrieve what I need seems to have more utility.