Paranoiac needs help: I am feed up to swap hard drive for Bitcoin... Please help

[Masha Sha]

I don't know what to do. Here is the situation: I don't want to be hacked and lose the few sat I have. So I use 3 hard drive: 1st only my Bitcoin wallet, 2nd only use it for exchanges and last normal surfing coming here, music etc.

I need another more useful policy I can't spend my day under my desk always swapping hard drive. Would using different user account achieve similar level of protection? Or what would you advice? I would like to use the exchanges with more comfort... I am sure I am too panaroid but do exchange really represent a serious threat?

Thanks for your help...

[pooya87]

stop doing that, you are going to ruin your hard drives by physically damaging them. there are so much better ways of achieving security and swapping hard drive is not providing you with any kind of security.

IMO you are just doing an extra useless work.

if you want your coins safe look into one of the cold storage solutions.

p.s. in windows using a user that has lower access level than administrator can provide you a little bit of more security.

[Masha Sha]

The advantage of this method is that my wallet, exchange and normal usage have all different harddrive. It would be hard to hack the wallet harder ice because it's rarely plugged... So then you would advice to stop using a different one for everyday use and exchange and just use one with 2 different account in them? Thank you for your reply.

[poptok1]

Wow, this is really paranoid indeed   But better safe than sorry, right?
From my experience I can advise you to buy good old IBMthinkpad, maybe
X61? or X41(even older) They are relatively cheap, with descent OS, like Linux, firewall
protection and a bit of brain you will achieve security level of hardware wallet.
I have in fact both of those laptops, they are somewhat cute
One is for wallets other for surfing. Power efficient, fast (you would be surprised)
and both well supported by Linux OS. Every thing works out of the box with almost any distro! I think they may increase in value over time, kinda indestructible equipment.
X41 (10years old) boots up in 25 sec. Uses 16-24 Watts, very quiet notebook.
(battery gives 1hour of work, still not bad after 10years)

[CoinBreader]

solution is simple, get 2 ext hdd (ssd) put there your wallets, and always run them from a pure/secure VMware instance, do what you have to do with your wallets, and when you finish shut down VMware turn off & unplug the ssd's plus put your .dat wallet file on a dvd & usb
and there you go rock solid!

[Mauser]

I don't know what to do. Here is the situation: I don't want to be hacked and lose the few sat I have. So I use 3 hard drive: 1st only my Bitcoin wallet, 2nd only use it for exchanges and last normal surfing coming here, music etc.

I need another more useful policy I can't spend my day under my desk always swapping hard drive. Would using different user account achieve similar level of protection? Or what would you advice? I would like to use the exchanges with more comfort... I am sure I am too panaroid but do exchange really represent a serious threat?

Thanks for your help...

Definitely paranoid, but better safe than sorry =)

May ask how many BTCs you have? If you have just some Satoshi at the moment I would recommend to an online wallet like XAPO you need to verify your phone + 2Factor. Which is pretty secure compared to the time you spend in my opinion.

[poptok1]

solution is simple, get 2 ext hdd (ssd) put there your wallets, and always run them from a pure/secure VMware instance, do what you have to do with your wallets, and when you finish shut down VMware turn off & unplug the ssd's plus put your .dat wallet file on a dvd & usb
and there you go rock solid!

Just have an epiphany, USB key live OS! You wont get more secured than this.
2 USB pen-drives with lightweight Linux on them. (puppy6.0-very potent BTW)
They can be cryptographically encrypted, with the strongest codes around.
Super fast to boot, easy to handle. Cheap as dirt (2GB drive will suffice)
You could install electrum or multibit(java) and be VERY safe.
Unplug and be happy on your widows.

[pooya87]

The advantage of this method is that my wallet, exchange and normal usage have all different harddrive. It would be hard to hack the wallet harder ice because it's rarely plugged... So then you would advice to stop using a different one for everyday use and exchange and just use one with 2 different account in them? Thank you for your reply.

as i said in my previous comment you are going to definitely physically damage the hard drives by doing this over and over. for the better security you have to have a cold storage means something that is never connected to the internet. it can be paper wallet or an OS that always stays offline.

~~
Just have an epiphany, USB key live OS! You wont get more secured than this.
2 USB pen-drives with lightweight Linux on them. (puppy6.0-very potent BTW)
They can be cryptographically encrypted, with the strongest codes around.
Super fast to boot, easy to handle. Cheap as dirt (2GB drive will suffice)
You could install electrum or multibit(java) and be VERY safe.
Unplug and be happy on your widows.

does puppy come with Python installed on it in order to install electrum?
and by the way for puppy you only need like half a gigabyte to put it and then you can even remove the USB and continue running it completely from the RAM

[poptok1]

-snip-

does puppy come with Python installed on it in order to install electrum?
and by the way for puppy you only need like half a gigabyte to put it and then you can even remove the USB and continue running it completely from the RAM

No, I don't think its equipped with python.
The electrum wallet is available from genuine, Puppy repository.
It will download and install all necessary dependences.
Java will be quite different story...

Yes, the system itself will use like 256MB of USBstick but it is recommended to use pen drives of around 2GB capacity, for personal & system data storage.
Running from RAM alone is actually great, but minimum 1024MB of RAM is required, for best stability.