Bitcoin Forum

i bought 4 bitcoins last month and decided to be a spartan  ::)  i come home after my afternoon class on tuesday and see my iphone dock my bloody guitar and  my laptop are all gone, guess which one i'm crying over.....not the iphone dock thats for sure, i hope the asshole who has my laptop sells it at a pawnshop around here...........yeah dont keep your bitcoins on your computer, just use a offline storage or a brain wallet #fml

Do you not have any backups? I tend to follow the IT adage "if you have one copy, you have nothing; if you have two copies, you have one". It makes things like this far easier to recover from.

I currently make nightly backups to a second internal drive, and copy a disk image from that backup to a drive sitting in a safety-deposit box in a bank every once in a while (though it's been a while, and I should do that more often). Online backups and cloud storage are good too, so long as you encrypt everything sensitive (such as a bitcoin wallet) before it leaves your computer.

Paper wallets created offline for the bulk of your holdings
Small amounts in online wallets backed by 2 FA

Even easier would be the encrypted wallet on a usb stick. 

You didnt do a back up at all? I would of uploaded the balance on another usb stick or something, if its that much.

Esp 4 btc..

Sorry for your loss.
You should have made a few backups (encrypted with good long password) and put them in different places, say one in USB, one in computer, one on dropbox, etc.

I feel sorry for you, 4 bitcoins isn't a disaster but yes It's about $2000 so It's a good pile of money. Hope you'll get your laptop back. And I sure there is ways to find out where your laptop Is when It gets another internet connection but It's probably not worth It for $2000.

Your main problem is you didn't do any backup. You can do backup on dropbox email and many other places. So it has nothing to do with offline storage or a brain wallet :)

I think people don't understand the importance of wallet, you have your money there for gods sake. I've backed up my wallet on my usb and have the file on my phone. just in case. Everyone who didn't bac up their wallet I suggest you do it asap.

Sad that you didn't keep the private keys on a flash or something  :'( you might find it in a pawn shop.

yeah at least now i know alot more about bitcoins then i did before loool

So what happens if they didnt do a back up, and their computer crashes.

Is that bitcoin lost forever?

Unless it can be recovered with a drive recovery tool or service, then effectively yes. That's why backups are so important.

You can never learn to do backup until you actually lose something, so better late than never.

One more note on this; backups aren't backups until they've been tested. If you back up to an external hard drive every day and find out a year later that nothing actually got written to it because your backup software was turned off by someone else, the drive was unplugged, the drive appeared to work but never actually saved the data to the disk, etc., you have nothing. Regularly tested backups are important, not just backups in general.

This isn't as critical for basic stuff like miscellaneous old files, but for bitcoin wallets, work projects and the like it's a good idea to check on it every once in a while to make sure it's still working properly. On the other hand, I lost my old bitcoin wallet (and every trace of the address, I don't think I had much if any in there but I'm not certain and I can't find it to check) from a few years ago when deleting an old backup that I didn't think I needed anymore, so you may want to hang on the the other stuff too. Storage is cheap, ~$100 every year or two is worth it to make sure you never lose anything that you might want later.

I use an online wallet, but keep backups of the export file on both of my computers and in my Google Drive (not public, of course). This seems to work for me, but would love any feedback as to whether storing on Google Drive is a good idea.

Sad to hear, I use an online wallet nowadays to store my btc (blockchain.info) they haven't given me a single reason not to trust them and I really think they will keep on being one of the biggest online wallets there is out there.

Encrypt your wallet in the future. Try using keepassx for storing passwords. Then make backups.

if you fail at backuping, at least put your coins in a desktop computer that can't be more easily lost or stolen, like mobile devices are

Sorry to hear about your loss.

Bitcoins are always getting lost or stolen, this forum is built on tales of theft, swindles, hacks and dubious investments.

Although it's not great news, in a rather ironic way, you're now a fully-fledged member of the community.

 :-\

Paper wallets created offline with BIP38 Encryption.

it's important to know how to safely store your assets before even buying the bitcoins itself. i don't know how you could be comfortable with knowing that your bitcoin is sitting in only one location; nothing in life is guaranteed.

Sorry to hear your money got stolen. How much did you lose?

You may be able to get it back. There is tons of tracking software on the web. If the thief uses Google, Facebook, Gmail, Youtube or others using your actual software they actually know where and who you are. Maybe you have friends there who could look it up for you  :) You mentioned iphone dock.. did it include the iphone?  If so : the iPhone has spyware which transmits lots of data all the time - even if it is off. So the phone company / NSA / CIA actually knows where your phone (and thief) is.

In the future make copies of your wallet.

Sorry to hear the loss. It is definitely painful to lose 4 btc. :(
It is very important to not only encrypt your wallet but also make multiple backups.
And even for offline wallet or paper wallet, you should still make backups...

What I have is a wallet backup on 2 computers, a USB and a paper wallet.

thats 4 Backups.


Sorry to hear bro!