Does anyone have a fool proof/best practices way of backing up private keys? Copy and paste makes me nervous and pen and paper leaves allot of room for error.
Best way to backup keys?
Honestly i dont think there is a fool-proof way of storing keys. My approach is having an encrypted folder in my pc, pen and paper in my wardrobe and an encrypted folder with encrypted .txt files inside a pendrive/usb stick.
If one goes bad, ive got the other.
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I have them
- in an encrypted folder on my pc
- on a usb stick
- on an external hd
- saved as accounts on other devices (3 devices. Every device holds its own accounts and those on the two others)
- printed version of the QR codes
If I lose access then I guess it was meant to be.
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Quite sure that you won’t lose your keys this way. I think the bigger problem is, that the chances are there that someone else gets access to them. But looks like now we have to accept it until hardware wallet integration is done. Let’s hope soon.
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I suppose you could photograph your keys too.
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If your worried about copy and paste, copy a random 1/3 of the private key and paste it into a notepad that allows you to do pgp encryption. Copy an equal amount of another random bunch of numbers, paste it as well but make sure you know the difference between the real numbers and the random ones. Copy another 1/3 of the private key and paste it in to the notepad, again copy another random bunch of numbers. Finally copy the last third and paste it into the notepad. Reorganize the numbers so they are in the correct order and encrypt it. The copying in chunks and having other random chunks will make it much harder to know whats going on. But if your already worried about copy and paste, then a key-logger will get your pgp password, so idk.
Maybe get an old camera and just take a picture.
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Would it be easy to implement on export it would ask the user to pick a password and then it would export an encrypted .7z file? I feel so nervous about the way the keys are exposed and exported now.
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Sounds like a good approach in to to improve the security.
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In the meantime probably best to save to your phone and then transfer this file to your computer via USB cable. Then using your own method of encryption.
Relying on someone else’s encryption is never good.
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Agree, but you’re exporting a plain text format to your phone no matter how you’re doing it…and your phone does all kinds of things in the background without us knowing about it.
Even displaying seed phrases that are required to be written down and test random words would be better, right?
I agree better not to rely on someone else’s encryption but at this point there is no protection at all.
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That sounds uber safe, I am sure you will be ok, I have a hard copy also…because you never know
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It is probably a bit too much. In this case I really don’t want to lose access 
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