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Trezor · What you recover and what you don’t
Trezor Suite: what the phrase recovers and what it doesn’t
Restoring a Trezor with the phrase gives back the keys to your coins, which is what matters. But the app stored other things that do not travel with the phrase, and that causes a very common scare: you restore, everything looks fine, and something is missing.
What does come back with the phrase
- Your coins, on every network that wallet supported.
- Your addresses, exactly the same ones as before.
- Your transaction history, because it lives on the chain and not in your device.
What does not come back
- The names you gave accounts and addresses: those were labels stored in the app, not in the phrase.
- Extra accounts you created beyond the first for each coin: you have to add them back by hand, and then they appear with their balance.
- An additional password you may have enabled, what some call the «25th word». That is not part of the phrase, and if you forgot it the correct phrase takes you to a different, empty wallet. It is the most common hopeless case with Trezor: it is explained in the «25th word».
If you restored and see a zero balance, don’t write anything off yet. In most cases it is an account that needs adding by hand or a different address type, not money that vanished. The causes, in order, are in I have the phrase but the wallet shows empty.
If the device is gone
It doesn’t matter. The phrase is independent of the device: you can restore it on a new Trezor, on a compatible device from another brand, or even in a desktop app. Losing the device with the phrase safe is, literally, losing a piece of plastic.
The phrase is only ever typed on the device screen or on the screen the device itself tells you to use. If a website, an email or a «support agent» asks for it, it is a robbery. There is never a legitimate exception to this rule.