Bitcoin Forum

Can anyone link me to some easy instructions on how to put your bitcoin wallet onto a flash drive?
Is there an easy way to lock the flash drive?

Second - I've heard people talk about loading your bitcoin wallet onto a website?  Is that true?
How would it be done and how safe would that be?  How could you make it safe?

Also, can you install multiple bitcoin wallets onto one computer or drive?

Thank you.

I'm reading through the stickied posts.  They are interesting not necessarily easy if you are not a programmer or highly computer and/or linux savvy.

Funny, because I know a lot of people, who studied computer hardware, sold computers for many years, who never got into this kind of depth.

I know that will probably irk many of you or put people like myself up to scorn, as I only studied A+ and have a CCNA.   ::) 

In order for bitcoin to really take off, the instructions, the usage and the security features is going to have to become easier.

copy the wallet.dat the appdata/roaming/bitcoin folder, encrypt it with AxCrypt or something similar. Put it on your flash drive. Erase/shred the old wallet.dat file.

Thank you, that sounds fairly straight forward. Cheers!

Rename it to something like "IPOD_REFORMAT.DAT" or something as well. There have been known to be trojans or virus's that look for "wallet.dat"

Or prying eyes...

Note: This assumes you are using Windows and the "official" bitcoin-qt client.

• Close the Bitcoin client.
  
• Click the button formerly known as the start button, usually in the lower right of your screen.
  
• Click "Run"
  
• Type the following

• Press Enter or click Ok.
  
• Right-Click your wallet.dat file.
  
• Select Copy
  
• Open your Flash drive
  
• Click Paste.
  
• Eject the flash drive

That depends on the flash drive.  Companies like IronKey market their usb sticks with encryption or authentication products.  You'll just have to take a look.

No.  Never transmit your wallet.dat to someone else.  You are giving them full access to your account, now and forever.

What I think you mean is using a web based wallet service.  This is a company, like a bank, that you trust to keep your money for you.  On these you create an account and they create an account "wallet" for you.  I think these are fine for small amounts of money.  Personally, I use my own wallet.dat for a "checking" account and a paper wallet for my "savings" account.

Certainly.  Just rename it.  Be careful not to overwrite one you want to keep and keep backups.  Recovering a deleted wallet ranges from scary to impossible.

Cheers.

As the above post says. Never trust online wallets.

Remember that it is still not 100% safe. I would encrypt the wallet and copy it to at least 2 places. and yes, you can store multiple wallets on a single USB, just be sure to rename them.

Then burry the USB in the back yard :) j.k lol

Thanks again. 

I also found alot of info about wallets on the bitcoin site wiki.  Looks like I have a lot of reading to do this week!

Depending on the amount of BTC, you may consider a safety deposit box :p

Don't forget the built in AES encryption of the reference bitcoin-qt client. If you use a good long password or passphrase, anyone who gets your wallet.dat file can only look at how much you have, but can't spend it.

Wouldn't it be a bit onerous if you renamed/encrypted your wallet.dat file on a USB and then later on want to perform a quick transaction with someone?

The steps of decryption, renaming and placing the file back in the proper file under the Bitcoin client doesn't seem conducive for regular usage. 

Would a paper method be as time consuming?  Sorry but I'm addicted to efficiency and also plan for years down the road when maybe I might forget how to manage all the steps. 

You have to balance security with convenience.

It's convenient to use a shorter password, but it's less security.
It's very secure to store on paper, but it's quite inconvenient.

There is Armory, which attempts to make this more convenient. You need a separate offline computer, which can be any old (or new) cheap laptop, which is supposed to be never connected to the internet, ever, again.

I personally prefer doing things myself, and offline backups of wallets work for me. Paper wallets will always work as long as you can read the paper, which is going to be a long time.

Cold storage is supposed to take longer to do, so you do less frequent transactions.

Thanks for your breakdown.  I'll need to start studying these methods carefully.  Don't want to jeopardize however few BTCs I have. 

Don't worry, I sold all my BTCs when it was in the $30. Now I can't even get one at the current price.

What I did recently, was use bitaddress.org offline to generate one private key at a time, then use the compressed version. Then I generate a QR code, and print both public and private keys on one sheet of paper, blown up (resized) to take up half the page. Then I put that in a clearbook or envelope.

You can also use 7zip to encrypt the .dat file. Remember to update your backups at least once every 100 transactions!

I laughed so hard!

Checked it out and that generator is straightforward and works like a charm.  Perfect for a wannabe hoarder like me.  For my technical ability I think paper wallet is a better solution vs encryption and constant backups.

Retro, I know

But do you have to have the whole blockchain downloaded to back up your wallet?
I sent coins to my computer but the wallet was out of date, it's reindexing right now.  The coins aren't there yet.  If I back it up, then put it on a thumb drive, will it see the new coins I sent?  I'm assuming yes.

If you are talking about bitcoin-qt, the wallet.dat contains your addresses as well as all your transactions. If you are not synchronized, you won't see recent transactions. You may want to fully sync, then do a manual rescan. The client will look back all the way from the first block to the present and grab all those transactions related to your wallet.

rescans can take awhile, 10 to 20 minutes as of today, so do something while waiting.

in the meantime, you can do a quick check on block explorer or blockchain.info for your specific addresses.