A Lucky Escape

On Friday, I mentioned that disaster struck after I got home on Wednesday and even thinking about it was so catastrophic that I refrained from saying too much about it and carried on as normal, in the hope that I could find a way out. I was sleepless with worry and the experience was on a par with being fired at work, getting evicted or trashing a brand new, uninsured car. Yes, you can get beyond those experiences, but it's not easy.

So what had I done? Flushed my Steemit password, is what. My Steemit account isn't huge, but it isn't tiny either and it is worth the price of a new small car in my country.

Picture: Pixabay

Yes, I do know the seven rules of Steemit and I had it drummed into my head never to save my master password in my browser but to use my posting and active keys for day-to-day transactions and I had my paper copy of my password and it saved on a hard drive and on a text editor on my PC. I also had emailed my posting key to myself so that I could use it for the times when I am on my phone at work and want to do some reading and voting. If it wasn't for that, I would have had to stop posting on Wednesday.

So how the hell did I still manage to lose my password?

Enter Notepad++, a code-reading and writing text editor that dates back to my website-building days. This is a program that doesn't shut your files down whenever you shut down your PC, it just autosaves and makes backups in your %appdata% files. So it is entirely possible to have unsaved text files sitting on your machine for months on end and never even realise it. The document I had created was saved on the desktop, but the changes weren't. For once, I closed the actual file, instead of the program and when the prompt "save changes" came up, I happily clicked "NO".

Imagine the horror when I reopened that document and discovered that my password and private keys were gone. Consulting Google, I found the instruction to go and look in the appdata files. The problem was that I had given the instruction to discard the changes, so there weren't any backups to restore. Ok, off to look on my hard-drive. No password. It seems I didn't save the changes when I copied and pasted the keys there. Do I have backups of my machine younger then six months? No. Oh well, off to find the piece of paper where I wrote my password. That was located easily enough but it's my previous password and the most recent password is nowhere to be found.

Ok, on to phoning people and asking on the help channel on Steemit chat. No, I can't recover my account because the password change is six months old. The only suggestion is to try file recovery software. I tried that with free online tools, but couldn't find anything. I was promised a cracked version of a paid tool although that didn't materialise quickly, the contact was looking for it.

In the meantime, I kept ransacking my house trying to find that bit of paper. I kept telling myself that since I never throw paper out (I recycle), it must be there. Go through the recycling bag. Not there.

This morning, I decided to go through the cupboard where I keep my documents, tax receipts and sundry crap, in no particular order, again. I decided to also take a look in the section where I has tossed all the empty lactated ringers bags left over from treating my cat Earnest for kidney disease that can't be discarded in the trash, because they are medical waste and I hadn't gotten around to taking them for incineration. Down the side, I found some loose banknotes that had slipped through the gap in the shelf above. Some consolation. I also found a tiny strip of paper. Open it and its a 37-character string written in pencil. Went upstairs, shakily typed it out and attempted to log back in. It worked. The sense of reprieve and relief was physical and I hope I sleep better tonight, because I haven't since Wednesday.

So, what does your password backup plan look like? Have you ever tested it?