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Back up your Sia wallet
Keeping your digital assets safe is something you need to put thought into. Whether those digital assets are precious family photos or keys to your cryptocurrency wallets, you should store copies in multiple secure locations.
This article will provide an overview of what you need to save in order to backup your Siacoin wallet, and provide some suggestions on how to go about doing it.
When you first create your wallet in Sia, you are presented with your Sia seed – a long string of words. This string of words must be stored safely.
- It’s 29 words... most of the time. There's a small chance you'll get a 28-word seed.
- It's generated when you first make your Siacoin wallet.
- As long as you have a copy of your 29-word seed, you can recover your Siacoins and your uploaded files, as long as you've backed up your metadata. Learn how to load a wallet from a seed (WIP).
Because your seed is so important, you should have physical and digital methods of storing it safely.
- Store it the same way it's given to you: all lower-case letters, with a space between each word.
- Make sure there is no space at the beginning or end of the seed.
Keep a laminated paper copy stored in a locked safe or a bank safe deposit box.
Keep your seed in a password or biometric (e.g. fingerprint) secured app like 1Password or LastPass.
There's an old saying about data.
Your data isn't safe unless it's backed up three different ways in three separate physical locations.
If there were a fire in your home, would your important things be safe? Even if you had the stuff you cared about backed up onto a hundred hard drives and printed out three copies of every photo you cared about – what would happen if your home flooded?
These are things to consider when creating a backup strategy for your digital necessities. And I don't use the word strategy lightly – keeping your data safe is a constant, evolving practice. Hard drives fail, drinks are spilled, electrical surges occur. Time moving forward, as it always will, increases the risk that your data will no longer be your data. When your last failsafe fails, you have entered into a data loss event. Make sure yours is minimized.
This attitude applies to more than just digital content, but that's a bit beyond the scope of this article. 😃
Cryptocurrency assets should absolutely be considered when estate planning as well. If you're holding long term, make sure your Siacoin balance is factored into your will, and that the person who receives it will know how to retrieve and use it. They'll need a copy of your seed, and instructions on how to restore that seed into a wallet.