Once you’re inside the crypto community, you’ll hear this everywhere: keep your private keys offline, take care of your own crypto, you'd better buy a hardware wallet. These small devices are designed to store your coins offline, far from hackers and exploits. But what happens if the hardware wallet company suddenly shuts down operations? There’s no more support? Are your coins fine? Should you run to withdraw?Well, calm down. The outcome is often boring; if you took a few basic precautions beforehand, that’s it. Let’s learn a bit more about it.Your Crypto Isn’t in the CompanyIf we were talking about a centralized exchange in trouble and your funds were deposited there, the situation would be a little more... complicated. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen the same with hardware wallets, because they’re self-custodial.That means your coins were never in the hands of the manufacturer, nor in their platforms, but only on their respective crypto networks, under your total control. The hardware device is only a convenient tool to access your funds, but they’re not really “inside” this device.Instead, many hardware wallets use common standards for recovery phrases and account generation, such as BIP-39, BIP-32, and BIP-44. Those standards are a huge advantage, because if one hardware company disappears, users can restore their balances on another compatible device or software wallet by entering their recovery phrase. Put simply, by writing their 12 or 24 secret words when installing and opening another wallet. It's that easy.Of course, in the case of a closed company, they might offer additional support for some period after closure, or vanish entirely. If you've forgotten your password but still have your private keys, you can just restore the wallet on another device or software with the secret words. However, if you're experiencing other issues with your hardware wallet, be sure to take full advantage of their support before it's no longer offered.Not Your Keys?The real risk here is… yourself. The seed phrase (private keys) is the only way to access your funds, no matter the device, software, or companies behind the hardware. A certain degree of compatibility must be there —for instance, you can’t recover an Obyte wallet in a Bitcoin wallet software. However, if you have your keys, then you’ll always have a way to your coins. The problem begins when you lose those keys.It’s easy to lose a piece of paper in the physical world. Some people tuck the little paper card into a desk and forget where it went. Others had it in a notebook that ended up in the trash by mistake, or burned in a fire. In these situations, we should be more creative and take extra precautions, since this is the only way in which we can access our funds. Metal tags are preferable to simple paper, and keeping copies of the keys in more than one location, with more than one person, will also prove useful in the future.In Obyte, you can create a simple textcoin to put most of your funds offline, in 12 secret words. Besides, you can create a multidevice, multisignature account to access your funds from more than one device, and approve transactions by more than one signer. This way, your coins will be as safe as possible.Don’t forget to test your backup procedure before a crisis comes. A hardware wallet company's closure usually belongs in the inconvenience category rather than the disaster category, but that doesn't mean you don't need your keys to unlock your funds.Featured Vector Image by upklyak/Magnific