Back up your seed phrase — so a fire, a flood, or a bad day can't erase your Bitcoin

The fastest way to lose your Bitcoin is to put your seed phrase into anything with a screen or a battery. A photo, a note in your phone, a password manager, a text file, an email to yourself — all of it eventually reaches the internet, and once it does, the words are exposed forever.

• No photos. A quick picture of the words silently syncs to iCloud or Google Photos, and now your seed lives on a server you don't control.
• No typing it in. Not into a computer, a phone, a cloud drive, or a password app — not even "just for a minute" while you find your metal backup. That minute is the exposure.
• No cloud, ever. Treat any digital copy as if the coins are already gone.

Your seed phrase should only ever exist in two places: written by hand on a physical object, and — for a moment during setup — on your hardware wallet's own screen.

The trusted pattern is paper first, then metal. Paper is for the moment of setup. Metal is for the long haul.

• Write it by hand on paper. As your wallet displays the words, copy them down with a pen or pencil. Then check your copy against the device to catch any spelling slips.
• Transfer the words to metal. Metal survives fire, flood, and decades of time; paper does not. Paper burns, soaks, fades, and gets thrown out in a cleanup. It is fine for a tiny pocket wallet, but for any real holding, metal is the standard.
• Check the metal against your paper, letter for letter.
• Destroy the paper once the metal is verified. It is both fragile and an extra copy someone could stumble on.

A note that saves you time: BIP-39 seed words are each identified by their first four letters, so many metal products only ask you to record those four letters. That is enough to recover the full word, with less chance of error.

Metal backups are the standard — but the label on the box is not a guarantee. Jameson Lopp, a well-known self-custody expert, has run several rounds of stress tests on these products, burning them, soaking them in acid, and crushing them. The finding matters: roughly half of the products marketed as "fireproof" or "indestructible" fail at least one test.

• Heat. A house fire can hold well over 1,000°F for hours. Good stamped stainless steel comes through readable; some cheaper plates warp or become illegible.
• Corrosion. Stainless steel shrugs off water and acid; weaker products don't.
• Deformation. Drops and crushing can knock loose the letter tiles that some designs rely on.

What actually holds up: high-quality stamped stainless steel plates (and titanium, which survives everything but costs several times more for little real-world gain). Marketing words are not a guide — pick a specific product that has been independently stress-tested and passed. And do a practice run with a throwaway seed first: stamp a dummy set of words, see how the product behaves, then commit your real seed. One more trap to avoid: products that etch the words and fill them with ink can go blank in a fire when the ink burns away, so make sure the engraving is deep enough to read on its own.

One backup is one accident away from being gone. Two backups in the same house are really just one backup — the same fire or flood takes both. So the rule is at least two copies, in two genuinely separate places.

• Home safe — fire-resistant and bolted down, as your primary copy. A safe you can carry is a safe a burglar can carry.
• A second, distant location — a bank safe deposit box, or a trusted family member in another city.
• For larger holdings, spread across three or more places, even different regions, so no single disaster reaches all of them.

The guiding idea: your backup should survive a catastrophe at any one location. And write down, in your estate documents, where each copy lives — "I put it somewhere safe" that you can't recall years later is a real and common way people lose coins.

Some wallets add an extra secret word of your own choosing, often called a passphrase or "25th word." It is powerful protection, but it comes with its own rule: the passphrase is a separate secret, and it needs its own backup. Your seed words alone will not open the wallet without it.

• Back up the passphrase on its own, and keep it in a different location from the seed — so someone who finds one still can't reach your coins.
• Include it in your inheritance notes (for example, "in the sealed envelope at the attorney's office"). "I'll just remember it" is the single most common way passphrase-protected coins are lost forever.

Finally, prove the whole thing works before you trust it with real money. Do a wipe-and-restore test: send a small amount to the wallet, erase the device completely, then rebuild it from your backup words (and passphrase, if you use one) and confirm the funds are still there. A backup you have never restored from is a hope, not a backup. Repeat a quick check once a year — locations change, and it's better to catch it early.