Updating my trezor?

A few years ago my husband had stored our bitcoin on our trezor. He passed away in 2019. I was able to access our bitcoin on the trezor once and then I put it away until I needed it. I recently tried to access it again because I am in need of the funds. It tells me I need to upgrade to access my wallet. I started to upgrade but it asks if I have my recovery seed. I do not have the seed. I have searched through all my husbands papers and his computer and have not found this recovery seed. So am I out of luck? Is upgrading the trezor going to automatically lock me out and force me into recovering the wallet with a recovery seed I do not have? Is there a way to get in there with an older version of trezor suite? Help please!!

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I’m sorry about your loss, @LitllBear.

The question about your Recovery seed is precautionary and you only need the seed if the update fails and you can’t access your wallet afterwards because of an incomplete update. Most times the Firmware update will go fine.

But it’s risky to not have the Recovery seed for the future, in case you’d need it later, so once you have gained access to the wallet, you should transfer the funds there to another wallet temporarily. When the Trezor wallet is empty, reinitialize it and set it up from scratch with a new Recovery seed. Be sure to write down the new seed on a piece of paper and put it in a safe place. At last, transfer the funds back to your new Trezor wallet.

You can test your new seed by doing a Dry run (simulated recovery) in Trezor Suite.

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Beware and check the firmware version of your Trezor.
Trezor Suite will show it to you in SettingsDeviceFirmware.

If your firmware version is 1.6.1, it cannot be safely upgraded without the recovery seed.
I believe Suite is showing a fat red warning in that case.

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Why is this, @matejcik? Will the user be required to enter the Recovery seed during the upgrade from version 1.6.1?
I’ve upgraded the Firmware every time a new one was released for almost two years now and never had to use my Recovery seed, so this was news to me.

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Yes.
There was a bug in that release causing every update to be internally flagged as unofficial and erasing the seed before installation. This was quickly fixed in 1.6.2 :slight_smile:

Suffice to say, we did not repeat this mistake.

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I see. Thank you for this info. It was before my time with a Trezor device then.

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