This is an important step to ensure you wrote down your seed properly. Never put more than $100 wroth of bitcoin on a new set of private keys until you successfully test it. Test it more than once and test all copies separately.
If you are testing a hot wallet backup, use another mobile wallet app to restore your private keys and ensure your balance appears. Restoring your private key means you are looking at the words and entering them into the restore feature of the wallet. Once you enter them, the wallet will retrieve all your unspent transactions.
If you are testing a non air gapped electronic hardware device, you will need to erase the device of the private key and follow the instructions on the device to restore it.
If you are testing an air gapped electronic hardware device (SeedSigner), you will need to spend the time re-entering the words manually.
If you are testing stamped steel, you will need to test it using the same method that created the private key. For example, if you used this method for your mobile phone wallet, then you can follow the hot wallet backup method.
If you wrote the words down incorrectly, you would only have lost $100, a very inexpensive lesson. It’s estimated that over 3.5 million bitcoin has been lost; not all from incorrect words but also from water/fire damage or tossed in the trash mistakenly.
