recovery phrase / seed
what is a 'recovery phrase'?
The recovery phrase / seed / backup key or mnemonic phrase allows you to recover all of your funds attached to the respective public key. Several kinds of wallets provide seeds in order to give their customers worst case backup possibility. Seeds should be written on a piece of paper and stored in a safe place. Seeds usually consist out of 12 ordinary words like e.g. Ice, Feed, Great and so forth.
How does a 'Recovery Phrase' work?
The wallet software of every seed word is assigned to a specific number. There exist different kinds of security standards. The BIP 39 contains 2480 words in his list. In effect this means a seed phrase with 12 seed words has 2480^10 possibilities. This equals to 2^132 words and is therefore called the 132 bits security.
two factory 'Recovery phrases'
These kinds of seeds have another security layer in form of a password. In order to recover your wallet, both the password and seed is required. This procedure is ensuring an even higher security standard than the 132 bits security.
Where to store your 'recovery phrase'?
The most secure way to store your recovery phrase is to write it on a piece of paper. Make sure that that the paper is stored in a safe place only accessible for you. Moreover, splitting up recovery phrases into different pieces is not a good idea as the probability to loose one part and therefore the whole recovery phrase is way higher.