Tip for new and old hodlers: do your disaster recovery test!

I hardly see this being discussed in the community, so would like to kick off the discussion. If you own crypto (have your own wallet and private keys) please remember to do every once in a while your DR test.

What is it?

It is testing and making sure you can recover from a major loss. Let me share what it means for crypto and hardware wallets (the most common and recommended way for most people):

You buy two wallets. You set one of them, taking notes of the seed phrases. Get those seed phrases and 'recover' in the second one. Then you send some small amount of founds and check both wallets displays the correct founds and data.

Once you done that, you use your primary wallet normally.

Every once in a while, I recommend every 3 months or so, but it can be ok once a year. You go and wipe one of them. Then you try to recover from the seed.

This is not to check if the hardware is working, but to make sure you have the seed correctly stored, and is aware and ready to quickly recover if need be.

In case of failure to recover, you can proceed repeating the setup step in other two wallets and recover from the compromised one without loosing funds.

Or you can ignore this and one day have to find yourself forcibly donating bitcoin to the community :)