Do I need to keep more than wallet.dat secret?

[njw]

Hi,

I know wallet.dat is the key thing I need to not lose or have copied. Am I then correct in thinking that the rest of my ~/.bitcoin directory is basically just public knowledge? I'm wondering whether I can keep it on a non-encrypted, fast drive, without any potential issues?

Thanks

[Spenzert]

The only thing you need to keep VERY safe is wallet.dat
The rest you can keep in a non-encrypted thing...

[njw]

Great, thanks alot for the confirmation Spenzert. I found that putting the main db on a uSD card made bitcoind exceptionally slow, so I'm glad to hear that.

[50BTC.com]

Don't forget to backup your wallet regularly!

[Stephen Gornick]

Hi,

I know wallet.dat is the key thing I need to not lose or have copied.

If you are concerned about protecting from loss, the wallet.dat is all that is needed to have the ability to spend the funds.  If you use wallet encryption, all that is encrypted are the private keys held in the wallet.  Addresses and transactions are not kept private in that file even with "passphrase protected wallet encryption".

Now if you are concerned about privacy, there is leakage of address and transaction data in the log files.  This is because BDB (database storage) writes this in case it is needed for automated database recovery should the app crash or proper shutdown not occur.

So if you don't want traces of your activity to exist on your system, you might want to use a TrueCrypt volume or an encrypted filesystem.

 - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/3142/153
 - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2140
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=63488.msg743339#msg743339