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RE: Doing my little bit to help crypto adoption
Ledger is one of the leading providers of hardware wallets...
Finally got around to buying a Ledger on a Black Friday half price sale. Thought it would be a comvenient way to keep copies of my wallets outside of the safety deposit box.... however it is looking like there is no backing up a ledger? That is, once tokens are on ledger it will have its own keys and your wallet.dat backups will no longer be matched backups? Is that correct? If so it seems dangerously like having all your eggs in one basket.
Any clarity you may have on Ledger bavkups would be appreciated.
The Ledger wallets and addresses (with private keys) are attached to the seed words (24 of them), in a similar way that most wallets are backed up by the seed words that generate the public and private keys for most of the crypto chains.
If you have a second ledger you can always reinintialise it with the same 24 seeds and you will have the private keys to the addresses. I would highly recommend that you use the 'deniable plausibly' option and have the 24 seeds plus one extra secret seed as your main storage. This allows you to store the two parts separately (24 seeds and the one secret) without debasing the security of your seeds. If you use 24 only, you make the security less even if you divide up the 24 into seperate parts as you are reducing the space of words to choose from.
Before you move any crypto into the wallet, I recommend also that you wipe the new ledger wallets, and try to reinintialise with the seeds (whichever way you do it...) to make sure that you can recover the keys (that you really copied the seeds correctly!).
Hope this answers your question (sorry if it was pitched too low, I'm never sure what people already know!)
Really appreciate you explaining things. Makes perfect sense now. Also a great tip to do the reinintialise test! Thanks!
I just re-read your original question, I thought it might be handy to make it clear that the Ledger will create new addresses/wallets for you. It generally can't be attached to existing wallets.
Thanks again. Looking forward to getting home and playing with it further. It had found, what was thought to be, a permanent spot in the back of my desk drawer. 😎
A few months back, they released a piece of desktop software called Ledger Live (it can be downloaded from their website). It is a much better solution than the Chrome apps that they had originally been using, I would suggest using that. I've been toying around with it at launch and it is pretty decent.
If you have any other questions, feel free to drop by and ask!
Another great tip. Thanks again! Will probably post about it once successful.
No problem... easiest way to wipe the Ledger is to fail the PIN 3 times.