How often do you backup your passwords?
A sad prelude to this 'Ask The Hive' post which should hopefully inspire people to make sure they have a solid password backup and recovery process.
At the end of last year, a user here (Steem at the time) contacted me on Discord and said that their hard disk was fried and that they weren't sure their backups were up to date. They usually backed up their passwords to multiple USB sticks but on trying to use what they thought was the latest backup, were faced with the message of doom:
Users accustomed to account recoveries were contacted for help, each of the keys in the backup locations were tested, and the busted hard disk was removed and passed to a techie to try to recover the data.
All methods tried were unsuccessful, and the person has finally conceded that the account passwords are now lost.
I feel bad for them. They were/are aware that one copy of their passwords was not enough and that occasionally hard disks can corrupt. They had other locations offline for which to store multiple copies, but somewhere along the line the process of doing this failed.
The account name shall remain undisclosed, but I will tell you that they had over 60,000 STEEM (and now HIVE) in total, and a raft of various Steem/Hive-Engine tokens running into thousands of dollars. And, to make matters even worse, the account held all their Steem Monsters cards - over $15,000 worth at today's prices.
Very harsh, and the toughest of lessons learnt the hard way. Not only is it important to regularly backup your key information, you also need a good process to follow each time.
So, how often do you back up your critical files and data, where to, and what is the process?
Cheers
Asher
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