Bitcoin Forum

Here's what I did:

1. I used Truecrypt to set up an encrypted drive on my computer.  I then moved my Multibit private key to that drive and I copied backups of that file to a network drive and a usb drive. 

2. I then deleted the Multibit key from its usual location on my hard drive, so the only copies that exist are on the encrypted drive, the usb drive and my network drive. 

I just sent money to Overstock.com from my Multibit wallet and it didn't ask me for my private key?  Shouldn't it have looked in the usual location (users/me/app data/roaming/etc), not found it and asked me to identify the location?  I feel like it's not encrypted.  Shouldn't I have had to put my password in or something? 
 

Anyone?

The concept of Multibit wallets works in such a way that you have to open a wallet before you can make any transaction, which means that if you could send something, then a wallet was already open. If it didn't crash or anything, I assume that you had already opened your Truecrypt wallet. The other possibility is that you actually didn't delete the original wallet (but if you are certain the Multibit folder in AppData is empty, then this is not the case).

I'm not sure how Truecrypt works, since I've never used it. But if you didn't set up a Multibit password, then it's OK if it didn't ask for one.

The wallet also contains the private keys.
When you export a private key file you create an additional copy.

With an encrypted wallet the private keys inside the wallet are encrypted, hence it asks for your password on a send.

Yes what are you talking about backing up the "private keys".  Just backup your wallet.dat file and encrypt it and that's all you need to do.  Don't make it overly complicated if doesn't need to be.

Just a reminder: Multibit uses a multibit.wallet file, not wallet.dat.

Hi... thanks.  I just checked again and I definitely don't have a multibit.key file in the users/me/app data/roaming/etc folder.  Also, I never redirected Multibit to where the multibit.key file is in its new location.  That's why I can't figure out how it let me send the coins... 

Maybe it's a little late for this response, but here it goes.
When you have a wallet on Multibit, the file path is shown in the title bar. So, when you made the transaction, you could have looked at it to see where the wallet was coming from (I don't think you can do this now with a nonexistent wallet, though).

If you deleted your wallet while Multibit was open, I don't know what could have happened. Maybe it was stored in RAM or something... I honestly am not willing to test this scenario.