If you lose access
A broken device is an inconvenience. A lost phrase is permanent. Knowing which situation you are in decides what to do next.
Most "lost my crypto" situations are one of a small number of cases, and they differ enormously in how bad they are. Working out which one you are in is the first thing to do, because the good cases are undramatic and the bad ones are not fixed by hoping.
Recoverable
The device broke, was lost or was stolen. Not a loss. The device holds a copy of the key, not the only one — the phrase is the original. Buy a replacement, restore from the phrase, and if it was stolen, move the funds to a freshly generated wallet afterwards.
You forgot the device PIN. The device wipes itself after a number of wrong attempts, which is the intended behaviour. Let it wipe, then restore from the phrase.
The wallet app was deleted, or the phone was wiped. The app was never where the coins were. Reinstall, restore from the phrase.
An import shows an empty wallet. Almost always a derivation path mismatch rather than a loss — check the old address on a block explorer first. The page on moving between wallets explains it.
Every recoverable case has the same solution
You still have the phrase. That is what makes them recoverable, and it is why the paper matters more than any hardware you own.
Not recoverable
The phrase is lost and the device is gone. Nothing can be done. Not by a manufacturer, not by a developer, not by any service. The coins remain visible on the ledger and unreachable by anyone, permanently.
The phrase is lost but the device still works. Not lost yet, and urgent. Send everything to a new wallet you have set up properly, today. You are one broken screen away from the case above.
You added a passphrase and forgot it. The twelve words are correct and open an empty wallet, because the passphrase produces a different one. There is nothing to attack and nothing to reset.
Nobody who contacts you can recover a lost phrase
Recovery services, seed-cracking specialists, sympathetic experts in a chat group — all of them are the second scam aimed at the same person. There is no mathematics behind the offer, only the hope of the person receiving it.
The narrow exception: if you have most of a phrase and are missing a word or two, or know the words but not the order, that is a computational problem rather than an impossible one. Even then, treat anyone who approaches you with extreme suspicion, and never hand over the words you do have.
Planning for what you cannot fix
The failure that gets discussed least is the one where nothing was lost and nobody could reach it anyway — because the only person who knew where the paper was is gone.
- Two copies, two buildingsOne copy is one fire away from zero. Two in separate places survive nearly everything realistic.
- Somebody knows it existsNot what it says — that it exists, and roughly where. Otherwise your funds vanish with you, which happens more often than any hack.
- Written instructions, kept separatelyWhich wallet, which device, and what to do — in plain language, for somebody who knows nothing about this. Not stored with the phrase itself.
- Check it once a yearPaper fades, buildings change, people move. A backup nobody has looked at in five years is a guess.
The test almost nobody runs
Wipe your device and restore it from the written phrase. Do it deliberately, while the balance is small enough that being wrong costs nothing.
Until you have done that, you do not have a backup — you have a piece of paper you believe in. Those are different things, and the difference only becomes visible on the day it is too late to fix.