Someone in this subreddit taught me a neat habit when I first bought my cold wallet. Here's what you should do first when you get yours.

At some point, it was like a cardinal sin to have bought your cold wallet from a third party vendor such as Ebay, or Amazon. It was always "Get it directly from their site" or have some good basis of data hygiene. Now? You can even get it on BestBuy. Next, there will be other vendors, and with that comes possible scams, and counterfeited products.

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When I first got mine back in 2017, someone in this subreddit taught me a valuable lesson which I think would be useful to a lot more people. This might seem like it is common sense, but there are a lot more people who should do this at least once for their own sake.

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The steps are as follows;

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1. Reset the device.
2. Get the seed phrases from the device.
3. Write down the seed phrases, offline.
4. Do a test transfer using a coin of your choice that has low fees to transfer.
5. Reset the device AGAIN.
6. Now, enter the seed phrases you wrote to make sure it's working. This also serves as a practice as of when you have to recover your wallet when you have to change your cold wallet in due time.
7. It works? Your coin is there? OK. Great. That's your seed phrases and you now know how to recover your cold wallet too.

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Here's the story where I found it was useful.

I got my Ledger Nano back in 2017, and the market dipped to a point where I saw my coins losing its value by about 90%. I chucked away my cold wallet, and it didn't see day light for 3 years. When the market started to pick up back in late 2020, I tried to recover it- only to find out the screen is dimming, to a point where I couldn't see the letters on the screen anymore.

So, I had to get a new cold wallet. I got myself the Ledger Nano X. Neat, but here's the trial by fire- it was time for me to try and use my seed phrases to recover my wallet. If it wasn't for the tips the other fellow Redditor taught me, I would have been much more anxious.

Plus, by doing those 6 steps, you can be sure that you have the keys, the coins, and some form of relief because now you know what to do when you have to recover your wallet.

Edit 1: For Ledger users, you can also do 'Recovery Check' which requires you to install the recovery check, start the recovery process to confirm the recovery phrase. However, I would personally reset the device to make sure I know how to recover it properly.