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Hardware · Damaged card
The recovery card got wet or faded
If your card is stained, faded or missing words, your case is probably a good one. Recovery phrases can be rebuilt when part is missing, and the word list is designed precisely so that a few letters are enough.
First: don’t handle it any further
Don’t dry it with heat, don’t iron it, don’t trace over the letters with a pen and don’t clean it with products. All of that destroys what remains. If it is wet, let it air-dry, flat, between two sheets of absorbent paper, without pressing it.
How to read what’s left
- Photograph it in good light, first of all, in case it gets worse.
- Look at it with raking light from one side: the pen’s groove is often visible even when the ink has gone.
- Remember that four letters identify any word on the list. You don’t need to read the whole thing.
- Write down what you read, including doubts as doubts, without deciding for yourself.
That third point saves most of these cards. The 2048 words were chosen so that no two share their first four letters. Half a legible word is usually a complete recovered word.
What the outlook is
| What’s missing | Outlook |
|---|---|
| Scattered letters across several words | Very good |
| One whole illegible word | Very good |
| Two illegible words | Good |
| Three or four | Depends what else you remember |
| Half the card | Usually not |
Before it happens again
Once you regain access, change the medium. The cardboard card in the box wasn’t designed to last twenty years: it gets wet, it fades and it creases. A handwritten copy on good paper in an envelope, or a metal plate, cost very little compared with what they protect.
And store it somewhere other than the device. If they are together, a single accident — a fire, a burglary, a flood — takes both at once.