Paranoia is good, but it's important to focus that paranoia in the right direction.

First priority is to make a secure offline Armory wallet. You seem to have the right ideas for protecting yourself from an array of threats.

The next priority is to focus on protecting your new offline Armory wallet from yourself. You should think about how you want to fragment your paper backup. For my savings I use a 3-of-6 paper backup with a secure print code hand written on each page. If my printer has been hacked, the attackers will realize it's no use to them. I store the fragments in a combination of hiding places, and with family members. I protect my offline wallet with a long passphrase and the laptop is stored in a safe with a key. It's quite possible that I will forget the passphrase someday, or lose the key to my safe. However, that's OK, the chance that I will ever lose access to 4 out of 6 of my paper backup fragments has an engineering approximation of 0.

Focus on testing the new Armory wallet before you commit your bitcoin savings to it. Practice restoring the wallet from your backup fragments. Make sure that you can read your hand written secure print code. Practice receiving and sending small amounts of bitcoin with your offline wallet.

It's really important to make sure you can send transactions from your offline wallet. This requires a functional online Armory instance. This is the most common barrier between new users and their bitcoins. Many new users send bitcoins to their offline wallet before verifying that the entire blockchain has been loaded and scanned on their online Armory instance. Don't be that guy.

Remember that YOU are the biggest threat to your bitcoin savings.

Once you feel confident in your ability to secure and access your new Armory wallet, go ahead transfer your bitcoin savings to it. I recommend that you simply send a transaction for the entire balance from you bitcoin-qt wallet to your new Armory wallet. If you are in the process of emptying your bitcoin-qt wallet, there's no need to be so careful with it.

Do not over complicate sending bitcoins to your new wallet.

Import and Sweep have very specific use cases and yours is not it.  There are very few legitimate use cases for those two features. Unless you know for sure that you need to Import or Sweep an address, you don't. For example:

Use Import if you have a vanity address that you want to keep.

Use Sweep if you have bitcoins protected with a random private key on a piece of paper.

Good luck and enjoy sleeping at night.

Yes, you can sign offline with 0.93.2 if you use 0.93.3 to broadcast the transaction.

Armory 0.93.3 fixes Low-S malleability when broadcasting a transaction (also when signing a transaction).

Note that this would alter the hash of the transaction between the signer and broadcaster. If maintaining a consistent transaction hash between offline and online Armory instances is important to you (you would know if it was), then upgrade your offline signer(s) to 0.93.3 as well.

Here's a work around that you should be able to use until we release a fix:

When creating a transaction check the box for "create unsigned transaction" and click continue. Export the transaction, then import it and sign it. If you use cold storage you are already doing these steps.

Then instead of broadcasting the transaction, click the link labeled "For more information about this transaction". That opens up a Transaction Info dialog. At the bottom, click the "Copy raw TX (hex)" button.

Paste the raw transaction to https://blockchain.info/pushtx  and click submit transaction.

Basically blockchain has already made the necessary fix to guarantee that the "Low S" is used, and applies it to raw transactions.

All of these error messages may be wrong. I was getting multiple different issues on my test cases.

I think scriptpubkey was for unnecessary 0x00 padding (a different malleability issue).

I'm pretty sure the ERROR for Low S violation in 0.11.1 is:

ERROR: .... Non-canonical signature: S value is unnecessarily high

There is more than one reason why transactions might not be accepted by core.

To be certain that you are encountering the same issue that I'm fixing right now, you have to find this string in bitcoin/debug.log

ERROR: AcceptToMemoryPool : nonstandard transaction: scriptpubkey

For instance if you attempt a double spend, everything acts the same failing to use "lowS", but you find this in bitcoin/debug.log:

ERROR: AcceptToMemoryPool : inputs already spent

Another one that I think is probably what you encountered is:

ERROR: AcceptToMemoryPool : free transaction rejected by rate limiter

0.93.2 has a bug in it that provides a very old age for inputs when it tries to verify the fee you specified. So instead of telling you that the fee paid is not enough for a transaction with many inputs, it thinks that since all of the inputs very old, it should be free and doesn't warn you need a bigger fee. Then transaction gets rejected by core, and you don't know why unless you look at the log.

Goatpig... please make sure your fix for that gets into this bug fix release.

This might be related to the "lowS" fix for a transaction maleability issue. The fix "lowS" fix is in Bitcoin 0.11.1. Armory currently does not apply the "lowS" fix, so Bitcoin 0.11.1 will refuse to relay some Armory transactions.

For now you should be able to just downgrade 0.10.2 (Edit: Actually 0.11 should work too) to broadcast, however as more nodes upgrade to 0.11.1 some Armory transactions will fail to propagate through the network.

We are working on a fix, and plan to release 0.93.3 with that fix and a few others by the end of the week.

If you make a paper backup and test it and keep it safe, you have all the backup you need. It will protect you from just about anything you can do to lose your own bitcoins, except exposing your root key to a thief. Even better is the fragmented backup. (something else to google)

On windows wallets are stored in the default data directory, C:\Users\...\AppData\Roaming\Armory, unless you specify otherwise.

Making copies of your wallet files will not increase your security, and will multiply the possible ways for an attacker to access your private keys.

My recommendation is to stop all of the following activities:

using a version of armory older than 0.91
exporting keys
spending or receiving bitcoins before syncing your wallet
spending or receiving bitcoins before testing your paper backup

Do the following:

Uninstall all older versions of armory. This will not touch any of your wallets. Wallets live in their own directory separate from the Armory installation. It is safe to uninstall Armory.
Install 0.93.2 on both your online and offline computer.
Sync the online instance of Armory.
Restore your offline wallet from the paper backup if necessary.
Take a look at these Armory tutorials https://bitcoinarmory.com/tutorials/
If you run into any problems check out the trouble shooting page https://bitcoinarmory.com/troubleshooting/
Create a new offline wallet following the tutorials under offline wallets
After you've created a new offline wallet and tested it and feel confident in it's security, move all of your bitcoins to the new wallet.

The last step is important, after all the things you tried to so far it's quite possible that you have exposed some of your private key data to the internet.
Even if you think you didn't, it's still a good thing to practice. Your private keys may at some point be compromised, and it's best if you've already practiced moving all of your bitcoins to a new secure offline wallet.

Regarding exporting keys... You didn't see all of your bitcoins because you didn't export all of you keys. New keys are generated every time you send or receive bitcoins. Also exporting keys exposes them to the internet seriously compromising your data security.

From some of you other comments and questions you seem to be unaware of how deterministic bitcoin wallets work. There is quite a bit written about them on the internet so I encourage you to google it. To summarize deterministic wallets, you only need to backup the root key. If you restore the root key it will always generate the same list of private keys to infinity. If you load a watching only wallet based on that root key, it will always generate the same corresponding addresses to those keys to infinity. It's that aspect of deterministic wallets that allows you to only have to back up a wallet once when it is created.

If you export keys from an offline computer you probably won't get all of them, and it compromises your private keys. So don't do that. That feature is only there for very specific use cases. For example if you have a vanity address that you want to keep, you might want to import it and export it to your various wallets. Inability to load and scan the block chain in a timely manner is *not* a good use case for exporting private keys.

The plug-in system is there for anyone to use to create plug-ins. You can run a plug-in on testnet without an Armory signature.

We currently have no plans to develop any plug-ins for the public version of Armory, but we may do that in the future.

If someone were to present us with a completed plug-in that would be useful for regular Armory users we would consider reviewing the code and possibly signing the source so that it will work with our signed releases.

Top tip for using Armory, make sure it's synced up with the network before sending any bitcoins to your wallet.

If you have some bitcoin looked behind an unsynced instance of Armory, see if you have any friends with a synced Armory instance. You can send them a watching-only copy of your wallet, and have them create a transaction for you to extract your funds to a new address that you know you can spend from. Your friend will can create a transaction to an address that you specify, then send the unsigned transaction back to you, to verify and sign with your offline instance of Armory. This activity only risks your privacy. Just make sure you really verify that the output of the transaction that your friend sends back to you is what you are expecting.

Here's another great article on why Brain Wallets are insecure:

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/brainflayer-password-cracker-steals-bitcoins-brain/

All you really need to know is that every hacker that is attacking a bitcoin brain wallet, is attacking your bitcoin brain wallet...if you have one, so don't have one.

Micma,

After you get bitcoins into your offline/watching-only wallet, please forget that you've ever heard of importing or sweeping keys. These are two features that have very limited uses to only a few people.

I have just looked at the dialog that you are referring to and it is a bit old and very confusing. Sorry about the confusion caused by it.

For now you will need it though, because you started down this path with your paper wallet.

Here are the steps to follow to get your bitcoin to the offline/watching-only wallet:

Note: All of these instructions are to be done from the online instance of Armory. You never need the offline system to add bitcoins to your offline wallet.

1. Create a new Online wallet and give it a name like "Temporary Wallet". Remember to always make a paper backup.
2. Double click Temporary Wallet to get to wallet properties.
3. Click Import/Sweep Private Keys
4. Enter the private key from your paper wallet.
5. Choose import. Import will add the private key to your wallet
6. Click OK on the Private Key Import dialog
7. Click Send Bitcoins on the Temporary Wallet properties dialog
8. Select your offline/watching-only wallet as the Recipient
9. Click MAX for the Amount
10. Click Send!
11. Enter the passphrase for the Temporary Wallet
12. If you forgot your passphrase. Restore the Temporary Wallet from the paper backup then go back to step 7.

Your new bitcoin should land in your offline/watching-only wallet.

Next time you want to go to your local Bitcoin ATM to get some anonymous bitcoins do the following. It's much easier:

1. Click Receive Bitcoins
2. Select your offline/watching-only wallet
3. You will see a QR code. Print it or take a picture of it with your cell phone.
4. Take your print out or phone to the Bitcoin ATM and use it as the receiving address

By the time you get home your offline/watching-only wallet will have the bitcoins you bought.

Delete the Temporary Wallet so that you won't be tempted to use it. Keep the paper backup for the Temporary Wallet, and the paper wallet that you imported. Keep all your paper backups in a file. Wait a few years, and if you are board, you can restore all of them and see if you or anyone else accidentally left some bitcoin there. It's like checking your old clothes for forgotten money.

1. Armory will search ahead some number of addresses. It should find them all unless you skipped a big block of addresses. You can generate more addresses manually from the Wallet properties window in expert mode. If you click on the number of "Addresses Used" you can scan more.

2. You would rescan the database

3. 7/7 fails to protect you against losing one of your fragments. 1/7 fails to protect you against someone stealing one of your fragments. In both cases you increase the odds of that happening. I think both options are worse than single unfragmented backup.

4. Lockboxes must be 1/2 or greater. We have no plans to change that.

Prab thanks for the bug report. I have noted it in our system. Right now Armory checks for a certain number of the types of inputs that we can report. if it's none of those, it converts the input script to a P2SH address and shows that next to "Non-Standard: "

For 0.94  we will make the logic for that display string more robust and eliminate all of the conditions that lead to an incorrect result. Then if it really doesn't fit any category that we check for we will display something like "Unknown" or "XXXXXXXXX".

Here's your problem:
E:\ProgramFiles\Armory\ArmoryQt.exe

With no arguments Armory is using default data directories on your C: drive. Follow the instructions here:

https://bitcoinarmory.com/troubleshooting/#q5

Thanks for the report.  I will add this fix in. If we get enough of these minor fixes we will release a 0.93.2, otherwise the fix will show up in 0.94.

There are actually two problems here. First, is that you got this error: "There was an error with the backup creator..." The second problem is that Armory crashed when displaying that error.

I only fixed the second problem so that Armory does not crash when you get that error. It is still a mystery how and why you got the error in the first place. To help figure this out, please send us your logs.

From the code it seems as if you must have been creating a fragmented backup. Is that correct? If so, you can at least create a single sheet backup for now.

The important thing to note is that it's not worth the effort of building from source at this point, you will most likely still see the error without the crash.

Here a few top tips.

Secure your bitcoins with a private root key that was generated on your offline computer, and has NEVER existed anywhere else. Importing private keys to Armory is fine to do, but don't try to protect your savings with an imported key.

Backup your private root key with at least 2-of-3 fragmented backup, test your fragments, and distribute your fragments to people you trust and/or secure locations. Some of the most common risks for losing bitcoins are mitigated with a 2 of 3 fragmented backup.

#1 top tip, before you put your savings into an Armory wallet. Send a $1 to it, and bounce that dollar around. Send it to your wallet and then back to coinbase, and back to your wallet again, then try to donate it to someone or some organization. This will make sure you can at least get your on line instance of Armory to go online, and that you know how to access your funds.  One of the reasons Armory is "hard" to use, is that there are a bunch of different things that can make it difficult to get Armory online. Too often people find this out after they have locked up a bunch of bitcoins on their offline computer. Don't be that person.

Follow these steps for best results:
Install Armory on an online computer
Get Armory to go online (might take awhile)
Create a hot wallet (that is a wallet that with private keys on a computer connected to the internet)
Send $1 to the hot wallet and spend it to verify that you are in fact online
If you get through all of that, then proceed with installing Armory on the offline computer and create your offline wallet.
Then repeat your $1 test with the offline wallet too.

There are some great videos here that might help as well https://bitcoinarmory.com/tutorials/

My bad. I tried to make a last minute fix to an issue with processAlerts, and ended up causing an unrecoverable exception whenever processAlerts (called every minute) is called before the network connection is set up.

We are working on fixing this ASAP.

Regarding the indication that 0.93 supports the 32-bit architecture, we are working on fixing the website.