Topic: Keeping or recovering seed phrases during or after a natural disaster. (Read 601 times)

You begin by setting up a brand-new, personal Gmail account. You won't share your Gmail account with anyone or use it to register for any online services. You will start by sending your seed phrase to the newly formed Gmail account. Remove the Gmail login from your phone or laptop after that, but make sure you can still remember and not forget your login password and your Gmail account name. Only when you need to access your seed phrase is when you log into your Gmail account. You won't ever log into the newly formed Gmail account aside from that.

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.

Depends on how you store them. You can't really lose it if you store it carefully. If you write it on a piece of paper and store it at your house, yes there is a good chance that you could lose it with a natural disaster, like floods would take it away and you will never have access to it.

But, if you could end up putting it in a few different places, far apart from each other, that would be a lot better for you without a doubt. I get that it is not going to be something that would be easy to handle, but you just have to handle it a bit differently. I get that it is going to be something that we can care on the long run, hopefully it will be doing something that would make sense if you could do it that way.

Depends on how you store them. You can't really lose it if you store it carefully. If you write it on a piece of paper and store it at your house, yes there is a good chance that you could lose it with a natural disaster, like floods would take it away and you will never have access to it.

But, if you could end up putting it in a few different places, far apart from each other, that would be a lot better for you without a doubt. I get that it is not going to be something that would be easy to handle, but you just have to handle it a bit differently. I get that it is going to be something that we can care on the long run, hopefully it will be doing something that would make sense if you could do it that way.

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.

The increase in the rate of natural disasters such as earthquakes, flooding, wildfires, etc. has got me thinking of how safe my seed phrase is when I store it physically. The recent wildfire in the US nearly destroyed the entire town of Lahaina, Hawaii. The recent earthquake in Morocco almost wiped out the entire region of Marrakesh. In Libya, the flooding devastated the entire city of Derna.

I have learned in this forum that it is not safe to keep or save your seed phrase online, on the phone, or on the computer. We are also advised not to keep them with third parties because they can be stolen or accessed by anybody. Rather it is better to write them down and keep them in different safe locations. Another option is to write it on fireproof and waterproof material like steel and keep it safe.

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.  

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.

There is not really a perfect method to store our coins, as every single method that we may think of is going to have several weaknesses, what we must do is that according to the scenarios we think we may have to face we can take the best possible solution we may have available.

And since our circumstances are different then this means that what it works for you may not work for me, but that is to be expected and if anything we may have to come up with a personalized solution if the place where we live has a significant number of challenges we need to overcome.

There is not really a perfect method to store our coins, as every single method that we may think of is going to have several weaknesses, what we must do is that according to the scenarios we think we may have to face we can take the best possible solution we may have available.

And since our circumstances are different then this means that what it works for you may not work for me, but that is to be expected and if anything we may have to come up with a personalized solution if the place where we live has a significant number of challenges we need to overcome.

Natural disasters will definitely happen and this is what we have to think about, how to store recovery phrases very safely from any disaster.
And people have found creative ways to do this. Paper is great but it is susceptible to damage especially from floods and fires, so think of stronger physical methods such as engraving on stone or metal and placing it in a safe place that only we know about.
And make as many copies of the recovery phrase as possible and store them in different safe places and in different ways to be safe from whatever happens, even safer, if we are still alive and intact. By making a small tattoo on a hidden part of the body with carvings that other people cannot understand when seen, could be a good choice.

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.

You should not store your seed phrase in any cloud service, this method isn't vulnerable to natural disasters, but it is prone to hacking because it is online. I don't recommend that people do this to mitigate the dangers of a natural disaster. I feel you're in more danger of losing your seed phrase if it is online, than you losing it through to an earthquake or flood. You'll probably be mad with yourself if you lose your seed phrase because it is online, than you would be if your seed phrase is on paper and you are affected by a natural disaster, but you save your life and lose your money.

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

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.

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.

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.