How to restore your Monerujo wallet on a different phone

Andrés
4 min readOct 27, 2018

There are several different scenarios that might bring you to having to move your current wallet (or wallets) from one Monerujo app to another. Whether you lost your phone, or it got stolen, or you drop it on a boating accident, or you simply bought a newer, shinier one, we’ll take a look at how you can restore your existing wallet according to different scenarios, from the worst to the best:

If you don’t have anything

Well… you’re screwed. You should have written down your mnemonic seed and stored it in a safe and private place. As Andreas Antonopoulos famously said: “Your keys, your bitcoin, not your keys, not your bitcoins.” which means in a wallet like Monerujo we don’t take custody of your seed, which is the key to unlock your funds. With such level of sovereignty comes big responsibility. Monerujo cannot recover your seed for you. Nobody can. The amount of combinations to guess a seed by chance is equal to find a particular grain of sand between all grains of sand in all beaches of the world. It simply cannot be done, and I’m truly sorry if you’re in such a situation.

All that was dear is lost.

If you only have your seed

Well, your seed is the single most important piece of information there is when it comes to cryptocurrencies in general, and Monero is no exception.

This is the screen you get when you click on a wallet’s details.

Simply open your freshly installed Monerujo, click on the + menu and choose Restore from 25 word seed.

You’ll have to enter the aforementioned seed, along with a Restore Height or Date. That would ideally be the date where you created your wallet the first time, so Monerujo knows where to start scanning and doesn't go back to the ancient beginnings of Monero. Just put there a date you’re sure your wallet didn't existed, and you’re set.

Monerujo will have to re-scan the Monero blockchain to find your funds, but you will eventually get access to all your moneroj, and you can breathe calmly again. Nothing was lost, except… for your notes.

That was close.

If you wrote down your CrAzYpass and you backed up your wallet files

If you did your homework and backed up the wallet files Monerujo creates on your phone’s internal memory, AND you wrote down your CrAzYpass (also known as your Wallet Files Restore Password), you can make it all come back as if nothing happened.

This is also shown on your wallet’s details screen.

So how to do it? You should have two files per wallet, one with just your wallet name, another ending with .address.txt, and another one just like that but with the extension .keys:

This is how they look on my phone’s file explorer. You can save them in Dropbox or something like that.

Then, grab your new phone. Install Monerujo. Copy those two files to the /monerujo folder on your new phone. Start Monerujo. The wallet should be there, click it to open, and here comes the catch:

Your wallet files were never encrypted with the password you chose, they were encrypted with the much safer CrAzYpass.

So, instead of the password you choose back in the day, when Monerujo asks for your password, enter instead the CrAzYpass you intelligently wrote down. The wallet will mathemagically open. You can now go to the top right menu, click on Details and use the CrAzYpass again. When it takes you to the details screen where you see the seed and keys, click on the top menu again, and choose Change Passphrase. Pick your own human-friendly password again. Close and you’re set.

Back in business like a champ.

Indeed, this is way more cumbersome than just restoring from seed, BUT in this way to keep the wallet’s name and all notes associated with transactions. If you use your wallet professionally and have a lot of notes, it might be a big deal.

That’s pretty much all. I hope you enjoy using Monerujo as much as we enjoy making it work. If you like what we do and would like to support it, please send some moneroj our way just by entering the OpenAlias monerujo.io in your Monerujo address field, or to:

4AdkPJoxn7JCvAby9szgnt93MSEwdnxdhaASxbTBm6x5dCwmsDep2UYN4FhStDn5i11nsJbpU7oj59ahg8gXb1Mg3viqCuk

We love you, you crazy empowered human being at the forefront of the crypto-anarchist tidal wave of beneficial change. Let’s make it work!

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