- What it is
- Your own copy of the mnemonic, code or phrase a market displayed once while the account was being created.
- How you get one
- You write it down during setup, in the seconds it is on screen, before clicking anything that makes the screen go away.
- Where to keep it
- On paper, apart from the passphrase, in a place you can reach without the machine that account lives on.
- How it goes wrong
- A transcription error you cannot see, or a credential change that leaves the copy describing an account as it used to be.
- What fails without it
- A forgotten passphrase becomes final, because the route back into the account runs through material you did not keep.
- Time to acquire
- The window is one screen during setup. Copying it carefully takes longer than the screen suggests.
Displayed once, and then it is your problem
The setup flow moves fast and the recovery screen is the only part of it that cannot be revisited. Markets show a string of words or a block of characters, say something brief about keeping it safe, and give you a button that closes the screen forever. People click the button because every other button in the flow has been harmless.
From that click onwards the market holds one thing and you hold another. The market holds the account. You hold a copy of the material that proves the account was yours to begin with. If your copy is wrong, the two halves stop matching and there is nothing on either side that can repair the mismatch.
Copying by hand, and the characters that betray you
Transcription is where most of these copies fail, and the failure is invisible until the day it counts. A word list mnemonic is forgiving, because the words are real words and a wrong one usually looks wrong. A block of mixed characters is not forgiving at all.
- Write in block capitals if the material is characters rather than words. Cursive turns into a guessing game after a year in a drawer.
- Mark the pairs that look alike as you go. Zero against letter O, one against letter l, five against S.
- Copy it twice on separate lines and compare the two lines before the screen closes. Two independent errors in the same place are rare.
- Note the date and which account it belongs to. A found page of words with no context is nearly useless.
A place that is not the same place
This copy should not sit beside the passphrase. That is not a rule for its own sake, it is a straightforward consequence of what each one does. Holding both gets someone into the account and back into it after you change anything. Holding one gets them much less. Splitting them across two physical places means a single bad afternoon does not hand over both.
Somewhere findable, dry, and away from the machine is the whole specification. The notebook you already keep is a reasonable home for one half. The where things live page goes through the practical options and what each of them actually protects against.
People who ask you for it
Support staff, moderators and administrators have no legitimate use for this material, and a request for it is a reliable sign that whoever is asking is not who they claim to be. That is the entire point and it does not need a longer treatment than this.
What deserves more attention is the quieter version, where nobody asks and you volunteer it into a form, a chat window or a file on a machine you share, because keeping it felt like an unfinished job you wanted to tidy up.
How a copy rots while sitting still
Recovery material is listed here as something that goes stale rather than something that keeps, and the reason is that the account underneath it moves. Change the passphrase, and some markets reissue the recovery material. Enable a second factor, and the old code may no longer stand alone. Your paper does not change when any of that happens.
The habit that fixes it costs a minute. Any time you change a credential, look at the paper before you close the session, and either confirm it still applies or replace it. Pair that with the check described on the dates page so that every written item carries the day it was last known to be right.
Questions that come up
I clicked past the screen without writing it down. What now?
Assume the material is gone and act accordingly rather than hunting for a way to redisplay it. Some markets let you regenerate recovery material from inside a working session, so the useful move is to go looking for that while you can still log in. If there is no such option, your account now depends entirely on the passphrase, and the written copy of that becomes the only thing standing between you and a locked door.
Is a photograph of the screen good enough?
It is better than nothing and worse than paper. A photograph lands in a gallery, syncs to whatever the phone syncs to, and quietly appears on machines you were not thinking about. If you take one to get through the moment, transcribe it by hand the same evening, check the transcription against the image, then delete the image from the gallery and from wherever it has already been copied to.
Should the copy be encrypted?
An encrypted copy is fine as a second home and poor as the only one, because it depends on a key and a passphrase that may be part of the same bad afternoon. If you keep a digital copy, keep it under your own key and keep the paper as well. The paper is the version that survives a dead disk, a wiped machine and a forgotten manager.