Bitcoin Forum

Hello to all.
Years ago I mined a small amount of bitcoin, using the bitcoin-qt wallet.
Some year after, for safety and speed purposes, I imported the wallet into Electrum, in some way that now Electrum sees the wallet as "imported" (no seed).

Now, after some other time, I am concerned by the safety of this thing, because I have not a seed to eventually recover.
I already recovered an SSD partition, taken the wallet form the old directory and put in the new disk installation, and thanks to God it worked - but I spent some hard time there.

I can't find any way by myself to generate a seed from the wallet I own; what are the options I got?

Thank you for any appreciated help.

What do you want a seed for? I see two options from current
option 1 is you do nothing and just leave everything as it is.

Option 2 is you make a new wallet with a mnemonic phrase generated and trasfer the funds there...

There are safety drawbacks to the first and security drawbacks to the second (if your system is less trusted for example) so I'd tread with caution but you might be better off with option 2 if your system is pretty secure - you don't download random junk - and you're running a recent version of electrum.

That is because Electrum does not allow the "mixing" of seed-based wallets and imported private keys.

Your options are:

1. Make multiple backups of your current wallet file and/or backups of the private keys in your "imported" wallet (ie. write them out on paper etc)

or

2. Create a completely new Electrum "standard" wallet... (new/restore -> Standard Wallet -> Create a new seed)... once you have set that up and have the seed written on paper, simply send ALL the funds from your old "imported" wallet to an address from your new "standard" wallet (TIP: type a ! in the "amount" box to send ALL funds minus fee... Electrum will automatically calculate the max amount available based on the fee rate set)

Older version of Electrum allowed a "seed wallet" to import private keys, but that creates it's own issues.  The seed phrase does not back up any imported keys, only the key it originally created.  That could cause a false sense of security (at best,) or a loss of funds.

My suggestion, for what it's worth is to create a new wallet with a seed phrase for back up, and then sweep the private key.  Doing that will send the funds to an address created by your new wallet.

If it's an older wallet you should also look into retrieving the forked coins from the same private key.  One of the reasons I make the suggestion above, is because you should sweep all your bitcoin before attempting to retrieve any forks.

If you want to be safe, using a hardware wallet is the best option for people who are specialists.

Generate a new seed with your hard wallet and transfer your funds there.

Otherwise, I would follow Jackd advices

Familiarize yourself with the file menu in electrum. File > save copy lets you save a copy of the wallet for backup purposes. File > new/restore lets you create a new wallet. You will need to do that if you want a deterministic wallet with a seed. File > open and recently open let you switch wallet files. So now you how to create a new wallet all you have to do is send from your old wallet to your new wallet.

If you want an offline backup and you're not planning to spend from that imported wallet yet,
you can export the private key from the imported address and copy it to a piece of paper just like a seed phrase backup.
Simply run Electrum with a copy of the wallet in an offline machine, open 'Addresses' tab (View->Show Addresses).
Find the address, right-click, select "private key", type your password and the private key will show up.

BTW, if there's no private key option, check the wallet type in the title bar;
If it says "[imported, watching only]", you have imported the address (not wallet) the wrong way.