Manual backup
Recovery words and backup shares: what BSV wallets write down, how the flow should go, and why the words alone are not the whole wallet.
A manual backup is the user writing the secret down and keeping it somewhere. It is the oldest method and still the one everything else falls back to: no service to go out of business, no account to be locked out of, nothing that stops working when a company does.
It is also the one users are worst at. They photograph it, store it in a password manager on the phone it is backing up, or put it somewhere so safe they never find it again. Design accordingly.
What gets written down
BSV wallets have two formats for the same job.
Recovery words
Twelve to twenty-four words (BRC-75). The format is BIP-39's and the wordlist is BIP-39's English list, so the words look exactly like any other recovery phrase a user has seen.
They are not interchangeable with one. The scheme (BRC-75) hashes the BIP-39 seed into a single master key and derives everything from it with the key derivation scheme (BRC-42), skipping BIP-32 and BIP-44. The same twelve words entered into a BIP-39 and BIP-32 wallet produce different keys and an empty balance.
Don't
Imply that recovery words move between wallet families. "Compatible with any bitcoin wallet" is false here, and a user who believes it will conclude their money is gone.
Do
Say which kind of words these are on the screen that shows them, and again on the screen that asks for them.
Backup shares
The secret split into pieces, any set number of which rebuild it (BRC-140). Five shares with a threshold of three means any three recover the wallet and any two reveal nothing at all.
Shares suit people who have somewhere to put them: a safe, a lawyer, a family member in another city. They suit nobody who will keep all five in the same drawer, which defeats the split entirely.
How it works
Each share is a point on a polynomial whose value at zero is the secret. Below the threshold there is no partial information to leak, which is the property that makes splitting worth doing. A threshold of one is not allowed, because a single share would be the key.
Both, from one secret
A third scheme (BRC-157) encodes the same entropy as words and splits it into shares, so either restores the same wallet. That is a convenience, not extra safety: each artefact grants full control.
Giving somebody both at setup makes two complete copies of their key and asks them to protect both, which is worse than protecting one.
Do
Offer one method at setup, and let the user change it later.
Designing the flow
Teach before you reveal
A user who sees twelve words with no context photographs them. One who has just been told why a photograph is the problem usually does not.
Do
Explain what the words are and where to keep them before showing them.
Confirm, but confirm something useful
Asking a user to re-enter three of twelve words proves they have the paper in front of them right now. It does not prove the paper is anywhere safe.
Do
Confirm a few words at a position the user must read, and follow it with a plain prompt about where the paper will live.
Don't
Block the wallet behind a full twenty-four-word re-entry. People copy and paste to get past it, usually from the clipboard, which is the least safe place for them.
Say what the words do not cover
This is the part most backup screens get wrong. Keys restore the user's authority. They do not restore the wallet's records, and without those a restored wallet may not find all of the user's outputs, because the derivation details for each payment were never on the blockchain.
Two lines are enough:
Your recovery words restore your keys. Your wallet backup restores your records: which money is yours and how to spend it. Keep both.
See Backups for what the records contain.
Let them check it later
A backup is an assumption until it has been restored.
Do
Offer a recovery check the user can run at any time, which confirms the words match without moving money.
Materials
Paper works, but burns and soaks. Metal plates survive both and cost more. Either beats a screenshot.
Do
Suggest two locations in different buildings, in plain terms: "one at home, one somewhere else you can reach".
Don't
Let the words reach a screenshot, a cloud note, a password manager on the same device, or a chat message. Disable screenshots on that screen where the platform allows it, and say why.
Pros and cons
Pros
- No service, account or company has to keep existing.
- Works offline and across decades.
- The user can verify it themselves.
Cons
- Users lose paper, and nobody can help them when they do.
- Anyone who finds it has the money.
- It backs up the keys only, never the wallet's records.
Related
- Automatic cloud backup: the alternative for people who will lose paper
- Backups: the records half
- Daily spending wallet: manual backup
Written from: BRC-75, BRC-140, BRC-157, BRC-42.
Checklist
The rules on this page, in a form you can work through.
9 rules