Bitcoin Forum

Here's what I did:

Installed (Mac)

- I installed Bitcoin-Qt (v0.8.1-beta)
- I let the application synchronize
- I then encrypted the wallet with a password
- I shut down Bitcoin-Qt
- I moved the wallet.dat to an external drive

I bought one bitcoin. I see it in my wallet.

Uninstalled

- I removed/uninstalled Bitcoin-Qt
- I deleted the Bitcoin directory from ~Library...
- I securely emptied my trash (there should be no reference to Bitcoin on my computer)

I plan on receiving coins and checking my balance online, from this point on, at blockexplorer.

If I want to sell/send my bitcoins one day, I'll need to restore my wallet.dat file.

To do this, do I just need to re-install Bitcoin-Qt, let it sync, shut it down, and then overwrite the wallet.dat with my back up from my external drive? When I turn Bitcoin-Qt back on, will I see my wallet and be able to sell/sent?

Thanks

Man youre doing too much...

 just install bitcoin let it sync .. do your transactions then turn it off and encrypt the wallet.dat with maybe --->>>  http://lrzip.kolivas.org/


Copy/move the wallet to a usb drive ..


Next time you want to use bitcoin.. First decrypt the wallet.dat and then turn on bitcoin and use it..

When done turn it off and encrypt the wallet.dat, and move or copy it to USB or secure location.



If youre that noid just move the wallet after encryption to a USB like mentioned and just put it back after you decrytpt the next time you use bitcoin.

Use one of these from each group in your pass:

Lowercase: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
 Uppercase: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
 Number: 1234567890
 Symbol: `~!@#$%^&*()-_=+\|[{]};:'",<.>/?

:)

The thing is I won't be using Bitcoin on my computer to sell, so I don't need to keep it on there at all. Maybe in a year or so (who knows) I'll want to load up my wallet and sell.

I just want to remove it and then restore it later.

My question is:

To do this, do I just need to re-install Bitcoin-Qt, let it sync, shut it down, and then overwrite the wallet.dat with my back up from my external drive? When I turn Bitcoin-Qt back on, will I see my wallet and be able to sell/sent?

Yes that will work fine.

thanks for the info guys, the should be a basics thread somewhere..

Thanks. I'll test it out.

I guess in old versions of Bitcoin-Qt you had to -resync or something after copying back in wallet.dat.

I just wanted to make sure you don't have to do that now.

That was my understanding too. I'm glad to hear that only the wallet.dat file is what acts as the container for the "crown jewels" and that it is as simple as keeping that file well protected. Will test it out to confirm for myself that all works as described in this thread.

Thanks everyone for your questions/input.

Please share your results. Thanks.

Worked as expected. I created two wallet.dat files with different public/private keys stored in them and swapped them around at will. Main thing was to shutdown Bitcoin-Qt first, then swap the files, then start it up again.

Some other stuff I tested on two different machines (both OS X running 0.8.0 (haven't upgraded to 0.8.1 yet):

Downloaded entire blockchain on machine A and created a wallet on it too. Installed Bitcoin-Qt on machine B but DID NOT start it up. Instead I first copied the whole data directory (~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin) from A to B. Then booted it up on B and it synced the last couple of blocks and was up and running nicely without having to sync the whole blockchain from scratch (and the keys from my wallet where there too). So was easy to port everything over to another machine and be up and running quickly.

why are people doing this? is it because of btc viruses, or something? or are you just paranoid?

Disaster recovery planning.

Thanks for the info.. very helpful.

But encrypting a wallet.dat creates 100 new keys in a keypool, so I'm not so sure it's a good plan to decrypt it for use, then encrypt it for storage. If you google things like encrypted wallets bitcointalk, you'll find people complaining about this. I could have sworn I read people dealing with wallets that had completely different addresses encrypted compared to decrypted.

Also, if you're going to use a wallet.dat for offline use, a wallet.dat from bitcoin-qt isn't a deterministic wallet, so once 100 addresses are used up, and they will be due to change, the offline won't be keeping up with the keys getting created online, or something like that. It's quite complicated, I still don't understand it myself.

I don't see how encrypting a wallet causes new keys to be created. Can you provide a reference to specific examples of this being discussed? I could not surface anything in google on this with the terms you suggested above.


Well, you should backup wallet.dat more frequently if you are using it for a lot of payments and therefore receiving a lot of change, which forces new keys to be generated as you burn through the first 100.

This is not an issue though if you are only using the wallet primarily for cold storage.

I believe you understand it wrong. The Bitcoin-qt client always keeps 100 addresses in reserve, regardless of the walet being encrypted or not.

My Macbook crashed... reinstalled OS X
Recovered my QT client & .Dat - .Cvs documents from 16G SD card.
When I launched the app, my balance didn't load.
The wallet was encrypted. . .

Bad luck IIIXLRIII. Did you try using the -rescan option ?

make sure you have a second backup of wallet.dat