If you are new to crypto and NFTs, it’s very easy to get caught up in the excitement and be in a rush to create a new user account or install that new digital wallet. I think it's important to take a minute and review what you are doing to secure and backup your account.
Play-to-earn games have really had a great year in 2021 and they have come a long way from when I first took notice back in 2018. I created the account I still use today over 3 years ago; I was very surprised when I logged back in all these years later to find the surprise waiting for me.
It seems the hours I had put into the then Steem Monsters, which is currently now the rebranded Splinterlands had really flourished and was not only still active but thriving! I remembered that I previously had a bunch of the Beta cards in my inventory and wondered if I could still access them? Sure enough, I could, and the 52 cards I had amassed back in 2018 had become pretty valuable. This has been the 4th time this year I have been able to log back into a platform long forgotten about to find that account had grown into 1000’s of dollars that I didn’t even know was there. I was also playing Crypto Bots around this time and because I was on these platforms so early, most of my cards on any platform I was playing on had become rare or early editions of the NFTs.
Why am I mentioning this you might be asking yourself? That’s a good question, and the answer is simple if I didn’t document my usernames, passwords, and private keys properly back in 2018 I would have lost pretty close to $10,000 in forgotten about treasures I couldn’t have accessed.
I have an IT background and creating, and documenting login information comes second nature to me after all these years. It never ceased to amaze me how many people would constantly lose their credentials or fail to write down passwords for software that was basically running their business. With our devices saving all this information for us now, I imagine this is even easier information to forget than before.
I was able to bring up an old spreadsheet from 2018 and see all the revenant information and log back into the various platforms years later and have full access to buy and sell the NFTs I had collected those 3 years ago. My point here and the reason I mention this, saving your passwords and being able to access them again at a later time is so important and far too overlooked in my opinion!
I was taught by someone along the way that a good backup solution could follow the 3-2-1 backup system. This system is very simple and effective, and it goes like this, you have 3 different backups, on 2 different media types and one of those backups is offsite. I would suggest, and this is only my suggestion that you could do something like this strategy:
- Create a new folder on your computer
- Create a spreadsheet with all your usernames, passwords, email addresses, URLs, and PIN numbers
- Export your private keys (wallet restore files) and save them in your new folder
- Once all your files are created and keys backed up you might want to zip the file and give it a unique name
- Now save one copy of this folder on your computer, copy one version onto a USB key and put one copy in the cloud on a platform like Google Drive
By using a system like that, you will not be in trouble if your hard drive crashed, or if you misplace the USB key and with a copy saved in the cloud, you could access this information anywhere with an internet connection. Is this the best system or the only way for securing your important information, no I’m sure it's not but it has worked well for me and I was able to access all my old accounts with ease.
It’s important to note that you should be updating these lists as needed and this system will only be as strong as the person updating the information. On a second side note, if your crypto holding becomes a decent size, you might want to leave instructions for how to access the accounts if something were to happen to you. These instructions could possibly be stored with your USB key in a safety deposit box or home safe. I took a couple of hours one night and sat down with my fiancé and gave her a brief overview of where I had some money and how she could access it if needed. Of course, not everyone will be in this situation but I can’t even imagine the total dollar amount of crypto assets trapped inside wallets that will never be accessed again.
We all love playing Splinterlands and possibly even other play-to-earn type games, but it could all be for nothing if one day you lose the ability to access the account you spent so much time building. The crypto space can be unforgiving at times and there usually isn’t an “IT person” to retrieve your password so it’s extra important for us to take these steps ourselves to protect our accounts before there is a problem.
I hope this helps a tiny bit, it doesn’t really matter what you decide to do, just that you decide to do something to create a plan that works for you! What I outlined earlier is just a basic idea, you would want to add further steps to truly secure your data and password protect it. You can't have all that information falling into the wrong hands.
Good luck and stay safe!