The rebuild approach after losing the phone
The phone that had the note is gone. Nothing else changed. This is what I did to reach nexus market again from scratch.
The three addresses
Nexus Market publishes these three onion addresses. Present as supplied, in no order, with no ranking. This site does not probe them and shows no uptime figure.
nexusb2l7fmqnefwphyy7m5zjhlkytlbo7qbb5lu5dlczr3azgii2gyd.onion
nexusma2iqgauqqvjcgds4ckv5xbf272tkfagq4epojjhsgleqpwxiqd.onion
nexusabcd6tyfhdwilyitaqiri6tisj2v2hueyjuj6qkvd6azvi5tuqd.onion
What went missing when the phone did
The phone had a note. The note had the phrase, not the full onion address. It had the name of the market and a reminder to use Tor Browser. The full address was not on the phone; it was on this site, the way it always has been.
It also had a browser history that would have autocompleted this site's domain if I started typing it. That is gone. I have to type more of the domain now, at least until my normal browser history rebuilds.
That is the whole loss. It is a small one. A rebuild approach after a lost phone is small when the phone was not doing the trusting work in the first place.
The first thing I do from another machine
I open Tor Browser on a machine I already trust. If I have a second machine that only runs Tor Browser, that one. Otherwise the main laptop. I type the domain of this site by hand into a search engine, since the autocomplete is gone.
The search engine finds this site. I open it. I look at the three onion addresses at the top of the article. The addresses are still the same three the market publishes.
I have now recovered everything the phone was carrying about the market. It was carrying nothing that this site does not have.
The rebuild is not about the phone
The rebuild approach after a lost phone is really a rebuild of my confidence, not of any data. The phone was not the source of truth about the addresses. It was a convenience.
This is a small insight and it is the whole reason to write the article. The parts of my market approach that live on my devices are conveniences. The parts that live on this site are the sources.
Losing the phone is a nudge to notice which is which.
What I do about the phone itself
The phone is out of the question for a while. It is not on my desk. Whatever data it had that was worth having exists elsewhere or it is gone. Nothing about the market lived only on the phone, so nothing about the market is gone.
I do not use the replacement phone for market visits when it arrives. That was true before I lost the previous one. Phones are not for the market visit on my setup. The rebuild does not include recreating a habit I did not want to have.
The address, from the source
The three onion addresses at the top of this article are what the market publishes. I copy one, I paste it into Tor Browser, I let the front page load and let the captcha finish. I do not sign in on this visit because this visit is a rebuild visit, and rebuild visits do not combine with account visits.
The rebuild visit is a look. It confirms that the market is where I thought it was. It confirms that my rebuild is done.
What the rebuild reveals about the previous setup
If the rebuild after a lost phone is quick, the previous setup was healthy. The phone was not holding anything the setup depended on.
If the rebuild is not quick, that is information. It tells me the setup was leaning on the phone in ways I did not notice. The rebuild is then also a chance to remove that lean before the next phone gets lost.
A rebuild approach that changes my normal habits is a rebuild that earned its keep.
Small habits I add after this rebuild
- This site is bookmarked on the machine I actually use, not on the phone. If the machine goes away too, the domain is still short enough to remember.
- I do not keep the addresses in any note that syncs to a phone, ever. The addresses live on this site. Notes that reference the market reference this site, not an address.
- I do not save the password to the market on the phone. It stays in a manager that never syncs to a phone.
- I do not use the phone to open the market. Not for a five minute check, not ever. This was already true and it stays true.
What the rebuild does not fix
It does not restore the account activity that happened while the phone was the machine I was using. I was not using the phone for the market, so this does not apply, but if I had been the rebuild would be a much larger job. Rebuild is easy when the previous setup was minimal.
It does not tell me anything about who has the phone now, and I do not need it to. Nothing on the phone would let anybody sign in to my account on the market.
The honest length of this rebuild
From opening the browser to being back at the front page took about three minutes. The phone taught me nothing new. The rebuild was small because the setup was small.
A rebuild approach that stays small is the outcome of a setup that was designed to have the phone be optional. This article is the receipt for that design decision.
The routine approach on a normal evening, the same visit before anything went missing
What this article is not. This is not a recovery guide for a device, and it is not a claim that any address is up right now. It is what a rebuild looks like when the device that held the notes is gone.