A few days ago I had a really bad Crypto scare . . .
It wasn't the price of BTC dropping,
or getting coins stolen from another one of my wallets like the Coin Pouch Verge hack
(I lost 33,000 XVG back in November!)
Or losing a flash drive with hundreds of Bitcoins you had mined in 2010
It was far worse.!
I had moved all of my crypto account information and wallet keys, for my entire portfolio of 19 coins, off my computer and onto a single flash drive to consolidate and make things more secure. My new security procedure was now I would plug the flash drive in when I needed to access a wallet key or address and then unplug it. I put the flash drive on a big key ring so I wouldn't lose it. I'm usually good about making two copies of everything in case of hard drive failure but I had a false sense of security with the flash drive because I had used flash drives for years without any problems. I did print out a couple of paper wallets but stupidly I didn't think about making a backup of everything until yesterday.
I plugged my flash drive in to access account information so I could login to one of my etherwallets.
It was a new wallet I had just created to store two different ERC20 tokens I had just purchased and transferred from an exchange.
To my horror, the warning you never want to see when you're plugging in an important drive popped up!
Then I realized the heaviness of my situation. I had backed up a few important things but since I had consolidated to one flash drive I hadn't been diligent with all my new coins or my logins, authentication backups, wallet seeds, word lists and mnemonic phrases. The only place those all were was corrupted. . . I felt really ill and thought about not being able to access a bunch of coins in my portfolio!
After a tense hour of running a few different data recovery apps I was eventually able to get everything back from the flash drive.
This really was a gift.
My new years resolution is to now always make backups, electronic and paper of everything new and keep them in two different places.
My advice to everyone else is back-up your Crypto shit.
Who knows how valuable some of these coins could become in 2018!
