Question About Amount In BitCoin Wallet (Forgive My Ignorance)

[boodaddy]

Hello,

Just want to start out by saying I have been researching Bitcoin very heavily the last couple days. I want to purchase a 100Gh miner from BlackAarow when they come out in February to start mining. My question is. I have read, and do understand about the importance of backing up the wallet.dat file on an offline computer with Linux. What I can't understand is once backed up does the original wallet.dat file stay on the main computer?

Let's say I have 100BTC in my wallet, after I back up the wallet to the offline computer does the number in the main wallet go to zero? I just can't seem to understand fully what would happen if I backed up my wallet and set password, and got hacked on the main computer.

Is backing up my wallet just in case I have a crash on my main computer? I also would think it would make sense to have a very small amount in my main wallet and transfer the rest to an offline backup or something, and only transfer what I needed to spend in my main wallet. Is this possible?

I would appreciate any help, or advice with this. I appreciate your time, and any help you can provide.

[philip2000uk]

I'm not good, but while you're waiting.  The Wallet has private key for the BTC funds.  You backup.  It saves the wallet with the private key to the backup place aswell as on your main place.  Oh and just click encrypt wallet too when you get it.  It'll just ask you to make passphrase.  I'd write that passphrase down myself.
go on bitaddress.org and play around with the key generator, that's just something else to the above if you wanted to make a paper wallet.  Difference is you have the private key visible.
Never play around with the brain wallet on bitaddress as anyone can do a rainbow attack on common words.

[torrentheaven]

Is backing up my wallet just in case I have a crash on my main computer?

This. All what backup is doing is copy the wallet.dat to location you select. Put backup somewhre out of your HDD in the case the HDD dies

[BitVenture]

The wallet.dat contains your bitcoin information. A backup simply creates a backup file, it's your responsibility to then make several copies of the file.
Personally I backup to the PC, then to a USB stick and external hard-drive. Every time I acquire or send Bitcoins I make a backup and date it for my own records.
As long as your passphrase for your Bitcoin wallet is good anyone hacking your computer would also need to hack into your wallet file. I recommend you also install armory for heightened security:
http://bitcoinarmory.com

[freethink2013]

You obviously haven't researched enough if you think mining is a still good idea,

[torrentheaven]

As long as your passphrase for your Bitcoin wallet is good anyone hacking your computer would also need to hack into your wallet file.

Or wait when you type the passphrase for your Bitcoin wallet and recording with keylogger. Once hacked, your computer is not safe anymore

[boodaddy]

The wallet.dat contains your bitcoin information. A backup simply creates a backup file, it's your responsibility to then make several copies of the file.
Personally I backup to the PC, then to a USB stick and external hard-drive. Every time I acquire or send Bitcoins I make a backup and date it for my own records.
As long as your passphrase for your Bitcoin wallet is good anyone hacking your computer would also need to hack into your wallet file. I recommend you also install armory for heightened security:
http://bitcoinarmory.com

Really appreciate the help. I will do the above, and install bitcoinarmory for online, and offline computers. So I don't need to break up my coins into separate accounts right? Really wish I could put all my coins on an offline computer, and transfer only what I want to spend on my main account.

You obviously haven't researched enough if you think mining is a still good idea,

True, I still have a lot to learn. I was using a calculator and it was calculating that I would make around $1000.00 a month. Is this number not accurate?

Really appreciate your time, and help guys. This helps me out a lot.

[odolvlobo]

True, I still have a lot to learn. I was using a calculator and it was calculating that I would make around $1000.00 a month. Is this number not accurate?
Really appreciate your time, and help guys. This helps me out a lot.

When it comes to mining you have to pay attention to difficulty and think in terms of BTC, not dollars. Starting now, 100 GH/s will earn about 6 BTC over the next year, but the difficulty is rising rapidly and by February that amount will drop to about 1 BTC over the next year. So, figure out how much BTC you are paying for the miner and compare that to 1 BTC you will mine. If the miner costs more than 1 BTC, then you are better off just buying the BTC directly instead of buying a miner and mining it.

[fivespot]

When it comes to mining you have to pay attention to difficulty and think in terms of BTC, not dollars. Starting now, 100 GH/s will earn about 6 BTC over the next year, but the difficulty is rising rapidly and by February that amount will drop to about 1 BTC over the next year. So, figure out how much BTC you are paying for the miner and compare that to 1 BTC you will mine. If the miner costs more than 1 BTC, then you are better off just buying the BTC instead of buying a miner and mining it.

Exactly, difficulty is very important!  Everytime I calculated out what I should be making the difficulty would change and I end up with far less per month than expected.