Bitcoin Forum

I think I might know the answer to this but wanted to make sure.
I am running the latest Core wallet and have been making regular encrypted back ups....now if I were to change my encryption password and then make a new backup would that render my old backups non assessable and usable to someone who found them but only knew the old password and not the new one ?.
I hope that makes sense...:-)

If someone already had a copy of the wallet (or obtained an old backup of that wallet) that was encrypted with the old password and you changed the password to a new password, they would still be able to access the old encrypted wallet if they had the old password.

I see thank you....that's what I thought....so if someone wanted to be 100% sure that his/her current Core wallet couldn't be compromised should old back ups /passwords get into the wrong hands then creating a brand new Core wallet on a new pc and sending the Bitcoins from the current wallet to it...then backing up and re-encrypting might be the way to go ?....or to maybe buy a hardware wallet and use that instead ?.

Any NEW address that you use after changing your password will not be in the old backups that were created prior to the password change.  So, if you want to make sure that your bitcoins can't be accessed with your old backups, you can generate a new receiving address (or addresses) with your wallet after the password change, and then send your entire balance to yourself at that new address (or those new addresses).

Even if you don't do that, any new bitcoins you receive at NEW addresses won't be accessible from the old backups, and any change from any transactions that you send after the password change won't be accessible from the old backups.  So over time, less and less of your bitcoins will be at risk.

That's probably more than necessary.

Simply generating a new address after the password change and then sending the bitcoins from the wallet to itself at the new address should be sufficient so long as the computer isn't compromised with malware that will steal the new wallet and new password.


You'll want to do that the other way around.  If you backup first and THEN encrypt, your backup will be unencrypted AND your encrypted addresses won't be backed up.  Instead you should encrypt first, then backup.


Sure. If you want a hardware wallet, they are a great option.

Thank you Danny for all your advice.

Regarding hardware wallets do you perhaps have any preferences.?. I've just been looking at the Ledger Nano S.

Danny had great advice (as is usually the case).  A hardware wallet can be another good option.

As recommended above you could either send the wallet contents to a new address and then encrypt that or alternatively you can just delete all the old backups seeing as you wouldn't need them anyway.