Quote from: jacobmayes94 on January 06, 2017, 04:16:00 PM

I am an advocate of hardware wallets and secure diverse storage of your funds. So yesterday at 5PM i sell a KNC titan to a UK buyer, pleasant chap who paid me in Litecoin directly to my Litecoin QT wallet (this private key was also imported from electrum, generated from a seed but I also run a full node, but use this address for many transactions where i diverse my storage from there.

So I hold them in this wallet (£1750 worth of Litecoin) and made plans today to move them into my usual Hardware and cold storage wallets (all of which have multiple secure backups of their seeds).

My laptops SSD failed... Gone. Nada. Before I moved the coins.

Of course, restoring my private keys from the written down seed was trivial, plus I had multiple backups of the encrypted wallet.dat of the private key.

Note there was also Litecoin from trading in there too, so we total about £2000 of litecoin.

Backup folks. I am not kidding. I have my electrum wallets, (all multisig) some business some personal on my laptop, backed up to random SD cards around the house, on my partner's PC and my tablet and phone. I imported the electrum wallet seeds to the mobile versions of electrum on my phone and tablet, i use my phone, tablet and ipod touch for google auth keys.

All seeds for HW wallets are written down and stored in multiple places, plus kept inside encrypted file containers THAT ARE ONLY EVER OPENED on an air-gapped PC (or you efeat the purpose of a HW wallet, compromise of that password would mean compromising the seed inside otherwise, i use VeraCrypt) with a random password (which I do remember, i remember many years worth of game codes and random WiFi codes which i string together and add directory phrases between them plus symbols and number sequences).

This wallet was only used for temporary holding of funds from transactions, but that doesn't matter. NEVER DELETE wallets either.

Also a word of warning. A single backup of your Bitcoin QT wallet is not enough if you send many transactions due to 'change' addresses when the keypool runs out. Use a deterministic wallet like electrum or hardware wallets.

Moral of the story, restoring from this took me 20 seconds, only had to rewrite a few 400 word articles which had not yet entered the days backup (and hadn't synced to onedrive yet) lost no coins and went on my merry way.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not unsafe to store seeds in the cloud IF and ONLY IF! you encrypt them using a SECURE (READ: Not directory words or simple) passwords on an air gapped PC and put them to the cloud in encrypted veracrypt containers via a memory stick and then download them from the cloud and open them on an air gapped PC once more. Provided the password has enough entrophy no hacking of your cloud account can reveal anything other than a useless encrypted container and the seed cant be stolen from hackers from it if you only enter the strong unique passphrase on an air gapped PC. I have not had to open these in ages but i am 100% sure of my password.

My main savings HW wallet i know the seed from memory now anyhow but i still have copies written down in case anyone else I know needed to get at it, and have restored it from memory only once, some of the older ledger's had a firmware bug which wiped them, since been fixed

It is the ONLY WAY to safely store seeds in the cloud. A weak password would mean you might as well put your private keys in there directly and wait...

I'm a newbie here but when I use private bitcoin wallet I have to copy the file wallet.dat, bitcoin address and private key for it then I save them in USB flash before I can do something in my wallet. it will be safer and restored.