How I keep my crypto safe

Locally on my hard disk, backed up in a cloud

Photo by Bogdan Dada on Unsplash

A few months ago, I didn’t mind having my private keys hosted on exchange servers. But there were some coins that I wanted to buy, which could not be stored on an exchange.

In the process of finding the best way to save crypto locally, I also realised that I shouldn’t save them on an exchange (because they are more likely attacked).

Local wallets are scary because my laptop can break anytime. I didn’t feel comfortable depending only on a hard disk. I also thought of copying wallet files to a pen drive but I lose most of my pen drives often. Not safe either.

I then thought about saving wallet files in my iCloud drive folder. But knowing that my private keys are on public cloud brought back the same problem (that probability of an attack to a public cloud is high).

My solution was to encrypt all wallets locally and save the encrypted files to the cloud.

Save crypto safely

This way, I always have an accessible copy of my wallet’s private keys. And they are to a large extent useless if hacked (because you’ll need a password to decrypt them).

I started a thread on Product Hunt asking for the best tools to encrypt. My requirements were :

• A simple ui
• A standard encryption algorithm (SHA256 or MD5)
• Should be available on macOS
• Should be manual (not sync automatically)

There were many great suggestions, I tried all of them and settled for Cryptomator.

Cryptomator.com

Cryptomator is a simple tool (free for personal use). It creates a folder on your system which can be encrypted using a password. The trick is to sync this folder on a cloud service provider.

Not just wallets, if you use google 2fa on exchange websites, you should backup the bar codes you scanned (because if you lose your phone, you’ll lose access to those websites) and encrypt and sync them too.

I generally had more than one wallet per coin, so I created a pattern of naming wallets : symbol-index, so my wallets are called xmr-0, xmr-1 etc.

I hope this article helped you out. Keep safe and trust mathematics.

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