multiple wallet.dat files

[forbun]

WARNING:
Only use these data files IF YOU HAVE AN EMPTY (or no) WALLET.
While it "may" be fine to put these in with an existing wallet, and
use the -rescan option, the target audience here is new bitcoin installs
with an empty wallet.

I have multiple wallet.dat files. How can I switch between them?

[deepceleron]

I have multiple wallet.dat files. How can I switch between them?

I would recommend that you consolidate by sending all bitcoins to addresses in one wallet. It is too tedious and there is too much danger of doing something wrong if you were to continue renaming wallet.dat files to use multiple wallets on one computer. This post details the steps just to move money to a fresh wallet on one computer.

If you have addresses in a secondary wallet that may continue to receive payments in the future, you can export the private key and import the address into the main wallet.

One alternative is to use multiple operating system logins. The Bitcoin data directory is a user directory, different user logins get a different directory. This will create multiple copies of the blockchain for each user though; you'll be updating the blockchain twice.

(mod: split thread)