Hey folks, it's not very often that I write from this account anymore but I've had a mad mission this weekend trying to regain access to my Metamask wallet and im needing to vent.
Backstory
Last Monday, my PC would not load up and only displayed "repairing disk errors, this may take over 1 hour" when trying to boot. I thought ok, I'll wait so I waited and waited and I waited some more. I googled and saw that sometimes it might take up to 24 hours so I waited 72 hours with no change. At around the 48-hour mark, I ordered a new PC because the computer I was using had destroyed an HDD in the past around 8 months back I figured it might happen again and the best thing to do was buy a new PC and get a fresh start. I have an external SDD with all my passwords and stuff saved so im good I thought. The PC is was using was only 2 years old and was a custom build, very fast and powerful but this time round to be safer I bought an ACER from a proper bricks and mortar retail store. It costs a little more than Amazon but you can walk home that day.
The new PC turned up on Friday because brick-and-mortar shops no longer stock most of what they display. (i wonder why Amazon does so well?). Anyways, it arrived after 2 days and I was able to get windows set up quickly before I had to go to work. On my return on Saturday morning, I started adding all my programs to the new PC and extensions to my brave browser. On my Meta Mask, I have 6 wallets. I have 2 main accounts, 1 personal and 1 SPI wallet for ETH and then I have 4 imported wallets from Binance wallet for SPI, LBI, CUBlife and personal. The 2 main wallets showed up from the seed words and I just had to import the other 4 wallets with the private keys. I opened up the file containing the metamask keys and saw 3 keys. You know that feeling you get in your stomach when you realise you're fucked? Yeah, so I got that feeling because I remembered something at that moment instantly.
I remembered at that moment that when created the MetaMask key file, I added only the keys for SPI, LBI and CUBlife because the file I was creating was a SPinvest file that would be shared with someone as a safeguard against me losing the files or dieing. Anyways, at that moment, I remembered back then thinking, I'll save my personal key later on and later on never came. I clean forgot it until that moment when I was released I was fucked. Im actually 98% sure I did save it at that time but just quickly and to my HDD and not the SPinvest external SSD but I'm 100% sure I never moved that file to my personal SSD and the file was on my broken PC.
I only use MetaMask for defi and I had $15k in 2 LPs. I thought so, I'll bring my PC that is not working to the PC repair shop and see if they can get it running. In my mind, I was thinking if I can get onto my brave browser and open metamask to export the private key I would be ok. I don't live in the clouds and put the odds of this working down to 20%-40% so it was my only hope.
I sat in silence for about 20 minutes just thinking about where that private key could be saved. I remembered that my personal BSC wallet was imported from the Binance wallet so if I could get access to that, I would be sweet. I went through my thumb drives and could find no seed words for the Binance wallet. Now, this shocked me because I'm pretty anal with keys and seed words and I knew I had saved them somewhere but where? I had no idea. I decided to remove the HDD from the custom PC because it boots from its SSD drive, I connected it using a SATA cable to an old PC and nothing, never showed up. I tried to remove the SSD drive hoping that running it on a different motherboard might help but it was screwed to the case with possibly the smallest allen key head I have ever seen. I decided to wait to bring it to the repair shop instead of hacking it out and damaging it.
In an act of desperation, I powered up my old old PC again which I stopped using around May 2020 knowing that CUBfinance was already out when I bought my custom PC and that chances were that the Binance wallet extension would be installed on that PC's brave browser. If this were the case, I could get the seed words.
After booting up the old old PC, I opened up the brave browser right away and again, my heart sank as it was not there. I closed down brave and saw a pop-up asking me to sign in to onedrive for windows. I thought, why not? and to my surprise, I found a file called "BinWallet Seeds" and near fell out of my seat. I saved the file to a USB and then deleted it from onedrive as it should not really be there as onedrive is an online cloud storage service but I'm thankful for me being sloppy and making that mistake. Turns out i installed the wallet entenstion to the chrome browser on that PC, ha!.
I powered up the new PC, added the Binance wallet extension and added the seed words and they worked. YES, IM IN!! and I see the account has a balance of BNB, BUSD and a few scrap LP tokens. My god, I was so happy and even rolled a celebration joint for my victory. The weight was off my shoulders and I got a sudden blast of energy as I had not yet told the wife yet and now I did not have to.
I was toking on my victory joint and listening to some Logic when I decided to check DeBank and see how my LPs were doing after a week of not checking them. I went to the site and again, the feeling I had fucked up. My heart fell into my stomach as I saw SPI's defi holdings and not my personal holdings. The 1st account I created on the Binance wallet must have been for SPI and after I inserted the seed words, only 1 wallet was showing. I don't know the balances of each wallet in my head so when I saw a balance I just assumed it was mine. This is a complete mess and this time around, I knew I was proper fucked because I had already exhausted a few options. This all happened about 7 pm and decided to go tell the wife so I did and she was pretty cool about it. Losing $15k is shit but I'm thankful I have most of my crypto in an offline wallet and still access to my HIVE stuff. At this point, i write it off and even deleted the holding from my mobile crypto tracker app, bad times. Pretty much all hope gone.
All my MetaMask holdings are profits and I was lucky to have withdrawn $4500 a few weeks back to convert some $'s into £'s while the rate was £1-$1.06 for an upcoming holiday so at least that was ok and not something to worry about. The holiday spending money is ok.
I walked the dog to get out of the house for an hour, in the fooking rain as well i might add, i did the LBI report and went to bed. Woke up after a few hours of sleep at about 4 am, which was 6 hours ago. I wrote a post for SPI and then set up a few more things for the new PC to keep me busy. It was running over and over in my mind that I had to wait and see if a repair shop could get me access to my brave browser on my custom PC, it was the only way but i had little hope. I decided to download the windows 10 OS to a thumb drive and see if I could use it to install new windows while keeping my files and fingers crossed for my braver browser. I was on youtube while it was downloading and I searched "Sync MetaMask to a new PC". The results were rubbish and not relevant but I saw and watched a video called "MeatMask | how to find your missing accounts", was only 2 minutes long, why not?
I saw the guy explain that when you import a wallet to a new extension it will show the 1st account created and then he said something interesting, he said if you had more than 1 wallet then all you had to do was go to "add account" and by default the new account would be the 2nd account you created. This get me thinking that maybe this could work with the Binance wallet as well and chances are my personal wallet would have been the second one I created with the Binance wallet. Again, some hope but pretty sure it'll not work as im watching a video about MetaMask but i ponder for maybe 30 seconds.
I opened the Binance wallet extension like pulling on the last straw and clicked on "add account", I was asked to name the wallet and at this point, I thought "Ok, this is not the same...SHIT!!" but I slapped the letter b a few times and slapped the enter bottom even harder almost out of anger 😡 but what I saw was beautiful 😍, a new wallet appeared before me, it showed 500 BSD which I had forgotten I had in there and as soon as I saw the public address, it was verified, I knew I had access to my personal BSC wallet again and I had access to my $15k. The wife is sleeping so I'll tell her when she wakes up, I guess from her not caring so much I lost $15k, and she's not going to care that much we've not lost $15k. Not rich BTW, far from it. I think from my wife's POV, as long as there is money is the bank when she needs it, she doesn't care and she knows that crypto is savings she never sees so not a change for her.
So there you have it, folks, this has been my drama and stress all weekend. Turns out that my own sloppiness has been a gift from the gods and I feel very lucky as the chance of HDD repair is low. When the custom PC destroyed the first HDD, I thought it was just a bad HDD and replaced it. At the same time as buying a new HDD, I bought 3 external Samsung SDDs for saving private keys and seed words for wallets should it happen again as a precaution. 1 for me personally and 2 for SPinvest, 1 for me to use for daily SPInvest stuff and another as a backup that is to be sent to someone as a safeguard.
Turns out this was the best money i ever spent because if these keys were only saved to the HDD or SSD in my custom PC, they would now be gone and I would have lost all of SPI, LBI, EDS, CUBfinance and my personal crypto funds. I spent £240 to buy 3 500GB SSDs and they have just saved me from losing access to over $250,000 of other people's money.
The point of the story is, to make sure you have all your private keys and seed words saved to an external storage device and backed up on another. I had 99% of want I needed and only found out I was missing my personal private key when it was too late. If you have more than 1 wallet within your MetaMask, each of those wallets has a private key and it might not show up with just seed words. I got super lucky, i found a saved file on onedrive that should not have been saved on onedrive and i seen a video that taught me to add a new account. I could have easily never watched that video, i only watched it cause i was waiting for the windows 10 OS to download and was bored. I might have never learned that all i had to do was add new account, would you know to do that?. I was lucky.
I run a lot of accounts so for a normal person with 1-2 HIVE accounts and a few online/offline wallets, it should be something that could be done within an hour of work and could save you tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars. Get everything onto a note doc or word file and get it saved to a USB and backed up on another. If you can use an SDD drive, even better. delete the file from your PC's memory. You should only need access to your private keys/seeds words if you're setting up on a new device assuming you use a browser extension to get access to HIVE/others for your day-to-day activities.
Hope you enjoyed the read and going through the rollercoaster with me, I'll be back with another post in a few months I guess when I have something to write about, lol.
Peace out and hope everything that follows this account is doing well, please reach out to me in the comments if we've not spoken in a while.
Have a great day!!