A Trial Disaster Recovery Of My Android Crypto Wallets: A Dry Run Of What I'd Do If I Lost My Phone, Some Things I've Learned In The Process & A Recommendation To All Crypto Owners...

For some time the insecurity of having all of my cryptos in my phone has nagged at me. It's convenient, sure, but the inevitable will one day happen.

• The phone will die
• The phone will get stolen
• The data will become corrupt or the app will irrecoverably crash (this scenario was recently covered by SGT Report)

... so before we sit down to our Sunday night movie, I decided I'd try out the process of recovering my funds on another device.

Some context first. I run two wallets on my phone, blockchain.io and Jaxx. The former is the oldest and was basically one I chose on @dollarvigilante's recommendation. The Jaxx wallet I chose based on good reviews and was born of my desire to expand into multi coin wallets.

It seemed sensible then to search for the Jaxx windows application on my laptop. I wanted to go with an application because as far as I understand, that gives me the best chance that the private keys stay local to the device. Although without monitoring the network traffic (and even then it may be difficult) it's hard to determine that this is the case. Surely any web based wallet however necessarily requires the server side to access the private key to encrypt transactions meaning that the key leaves your local device, something I'd like to avoid.

I searched my laptop for the 12 word recovery passphrase that I'd written down when setting up the wallet. The installation was a breeze on windows and the setup was easy to follow. First came the policy confirmation

... then came the choice of whether I wanted to create a new wallet or restore an existing one. Great! I selected the restore option.

... and then came the excitement of entering my recovery phrase. Brilliant! A few moments of "initializing wallet" and there was my balance and my transaction list. Hero!

But wait a minute, when I visited the Ethereum tab on my restored Jaxx wallet, the balance was zero. My mood tempered. How can this be? Was it taking longer to initialise the Ethereum wallet than the Bitcoin wallet? I went back to my phone and sure enough, there was my Ethereum.

Horror of horrors. Then, I noticed that my windows wallet was showing a higher Bitcoin value than my phone. Had the recovery lumped my Ethereum into my Bitcoin balance and aggregated them? Surely not!

After some thought, I wondered whether what I was seeing was my other Blockchain.io balance. I logged into that wallet on my phone and sure enough, the balance and transaction history matched. So what I'd done was enter the wrong recovery phase meaning that my Jaxx windows wallet now shows the contents of my Blockchain.io android wallet. This makes sense if you think about it. The wallet is just software that implements the protocol. Your balance isn't vendor specific.

That lead to the obvious question of where on earth my Jaxx recovery phrase was. Naughty @nolnocluap! I couldn't find it recorded. Finding that deficiency was exactly why I wanted to run through the process. I went into my phone, exported my recovery phrase and recorded it, hopefully dodging a bullet in the process.

I think tried to do the same with Blockchain.io, thinking I'd restore my Jaxx balance there. I couldn't find an application download, only the web interface that I was able to log into and view my balance in. This concerned me due to the remote nature of the private key so I may decide to ditch that wallet in the future. I'd certainly be open to input on that issue!

Interestingly, I don't seem to be able to disassociate my recovery phrase with my windows wallet now so I can't easily repeat the process with the Jaxx phrase to match what's on my phone. Perhaps the installation folder caches this and blowing that away may run me through the initial steps again. I'll have to look at that another time. I'm also left with the situation that I'll likely want to adopt another local (non-web) wallet for my Blockchain.io balance.

For now at least, I'm happy that I've got a decent chance of getting at my cryptos should my phone access be unavailable for some reason. The big lesson, like anything related to preparedness, is to try it out before you need to. I highly recommend that crypto owners attempt something similar on different devices to ensure that the loss of your primary method of access doesn't result in a loss of your hard earned coins.

Thanks as always for your readership!