Your first recovery drill: how to test-restore without risking funds
If you’ve never restored your wallet from backup, you don’t have a backup – you have a story you tell yourself.
A recovery drill is simply proving, end-to-end, that you can get your wallet back from the words you wrote down, without “winging it”, without guessing, and without trusting that Past You did everything perfectly.
This is the boring part that saves people from the most expensive kind of learning.
The rules:
Do not use your main wallet as the test environment.
Do not move meaningful funds during the drill. If you move anything at all, make it a tiny amount you can afford to lose.
Do the drill when you’re awake and un-rushed. Tired you is where mistakes breed.
Never type your seed phrase or passphrase into a website. Not for a drill, not for “verification”, not ever.
If anything feels off, stop. A recovery drill is not a race.
What you’re actually testing:
your seed/recovery phrase was recorded correctly (words + order)
you understand whether a passphrase exists and how it’s entered
you can identify “success” (the right wallet) without relying on vibes
your setup is recoverable by Future You (and, if relevant, your heirs)
What you need:
Your seed/recovery phrase (12/18/24 words)
Your passphrase if you use one (it’s not a “25th word” – it’s a separate secret)
A safe place to do the test:
ideally a spare hardware signer, or
a fresh software wallet install on a device you trust, or
a watch-only first approach (best for sanity-checking without exposing keys)
If you’re using a hardware signer: you can do the drill on the device itself, or you can restore into a temporary software wallet just to verify addresses. The goal is verification, not “switching wallets”.
The recovery drill:
Choose a safe test environment
Best: a spare device dedicated to wallet stuff
Good: a trusted computer with a fresh wallet install
Okay: your normal computer, but only if you’re disciplined (no random extensions, no mystery downloads, no rushing)
Whatever you choose, the real security win is this: download the wallet safely.
Start with seed-only (even if you use a passphrase)
Restore using only the seed phrase first.
Why: it helps you detect whether your “seed-only wallet” is a thing you accidentally created, and it makes passphrase issues easier to spot later.
What to do:
Create a new wallet in your test environment
Choose the “restore/import” flow
Enter the seed phrase carefully
Double-check spelling and word order before confirming
If you use a passphrase, do the passphrase restore as a separate test
Now restore again (or add the passphrase in the correct flow) using: seed phrase + passphrase
This is where people get hurt, because passphrase mistakes don’t fail loudly. A typo usually doesn’t throw an error – it lands you in a different wallet.
Passphrase hygiene during the drill:
Treat it as case-sensitive (because it is)
Be paranoid about spaces (leading/trailing spaces are classic foot-guns)
Be consistent about punctuation
Don’t “clean it up” mentally (write it exactly as intended)
Verify you’re in the right wallet (addresses, not vibes)
This is the most important part of the drill.
Pick one verification method:
Safest: compare a known receive address from your real wallet to the restored wallet
Also good: compare an xpub (watch-only) or wallet fingerprint (advanced, but solid)
If you must use balances: use them only as a weak signal (balances can be misleading depending on sync, servers, and wallet behaviour)
How to do it practically:
From your real wallet (the one you actually use), copy one known receive address you’ve used before
In the restored wallet, generate receive addresses and confirm you can reproduce that same address
If you cannot match known addresses, don’t assume you’re “hacked”. Assume one of these first:
wrong word order
one wrong word
passphrase mismatch (including a space)
you restored into a different wallet type than before
you’re on the wrong account/derivation path (more common than people admit)
Optional but valuable: do a tiny transaction test
Only if you’re comfortable and only with a tiny amount:
send a tiny amount to an address generated by the restored wallet
then send it back out
This proves signing works, not just viewing.
If you’re using a hardware signer, verify the address on the device screen, not only on the computer/phone.
Write down what Future You needs (without writing down secrets)
After the drill, update a non-secret note that answers:
Which wallet software/device was used to restore successfully
Whether a passphrase exists (yes/no)
Any gotchas you hit (spaces, capitals, “temporary vs saved passphrase” behaviour)
What “success” looked like (example: “receive address X matched”)
This is where your inheritance planning becomes real: you’re turning “in theory” into “repeatable”.
Common failure modes:
One word wrong: close-but-not-quite spelling is still wrong
Word order wrong: the words are correct, the wallet is not
Passphrase typo: especially spaces and capitals
Passphrase entered in the wrong place: some wallets treat passphrase flows differently
Restoring the wrong thing: seed phrase is not a password, and passphrase is not optional if you used one
“I’ll remember what I meant” backups: encoding schemes and abbreviations that don’t decode cleanly under stress
You’re not proving you’re clever. You’re proving you’re recoverable.
If recovery isn’t boring yet, your setup isn’t finished. Do the drill now, fix what’s unclear, and only then scale up the amount you store.
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