HOWTO: create a 100% secure wallet

[jrslyrics]

I am no longer an anonymous reader as the insults were starting to hurt my feelings.

[charliemaggot]

Safety first.

And backups...have backups.

[goldway90]

really good tutorial , i really needed this since i'm new the bitcoins cmmunity

[KK0156]

thank you

[ekimjune23]

Thanks, time to clean off the old USB drive.

[lbr]

Using EFS and alternatives could be also helpfull.

[twelph]

Etch it into steel

[brekyrself]

Newbie question after also reading this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=165117.0

1. Using the main Qt client,  I created and backed up a wallet.dat with 10 receiving addresses to USB A & B.  One of the addresses is receiving coins from mining if it makes a difference.
2. I need to send a few coins
3. I load up USB-A from cold storage and send the coin
4. Do I now need to re-backup the wallet.dat onto USB-B also because of change addresses?

[Rainmaker25]

So you store the OS and browsers and your wallet on a flash drive?

[uberoxide]

The bitcoin client that you installed in the safe environment doesn't need to run in order for you to receive a transaction. That the beauty of this way of securing your coins. It's enough that the network is confirming the transaction for you :-)

[mattjenkins]

Thanks!

[AEPropMgmt]

Great advice, thank you.

[c1010010]

I follow this in some ways... but not entirely.

The main thing I do is that I have a safety wallet, and a spend wallet.  Simple enough to implement.

[rmarma01]

what happens though if your live image gets lost or corrupted? You should have it backed up in multiple places. I back up mine online, offline, and on paper(Passwords that is).

[Azure]

Entertaining

 

[bitcoinloser]

hi,

two years ago i bought a load of bitcoins and stored them offline,
unencrypted, following the exact process outlined in the original post in this thread.

today i decided to sell them. so i retrieved my wallet.dat file from storage.

then i downloaded the bitcoin client. then i pasted my wallet.dat in the correct place and let it run for 8 hours until it
had synced. it was just about to finish syncing when i got the
error message saying "file corrupt. salvage failed."

then i tried to see if i could upload the file to a blockchain wallet.

i got an error message saying something along the lines of "invalid file
type or incorrect password, no keys uploaded."

so there must be something wrong with my wallet.dat file. but i have no
idea how it became corrupted and what I can do about it to recover my
bitcoins.

i am pretty tech savvy, as far as using windows goes. but when it comes to
playing around in linux and source code, i have no idea. (i use an ubuntu
machine for all my bitcoin work.)

any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated...

[wgrand]

good guide, thx!

[gacbmmml]

hi,

two years ago i bought a load of bitcoins and stored them offline,
unencrypted, following the exact process outlined in the original post in this thread.

today i decided to sell them. so i retrieved my wallet.dat file from storage.

then i downloaded the bitcoin client. then i pasted my wallet.dat in the correct place and let it run for 8 hours until it
had synced. it was just about to finish syncing when i got the
error message saying "file corrupt. salvage failed."

then i tried to see if i could upload the file to a blockchain wallet.

i got an error message saying something along the lines of "invalid file
type or incorrect password, no keys uploaded."

so there must be something wrong with my wallet.dat file. but i have no
idea how it became corrupted and what I can do about it to recover my
bitcoins.

i am pretty tech savvy, as far as using windows goes. but when it comes to
playing around in linux and source code, i have no idea. (i use an ubuntu
machine for all my bitcoin work.)

any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated...

You need two things... your wallet.dat AND your private keys. So if you're missing your private keys then you might be out of luck accessing that wallet. Of note, just because a wallet.dat is "unecrypted" doesn't mean that it still doesn't use private keys for access.

[bitcoinloser]

i don't understand. your wallet.dat IS your private keys.

i followed the instructions to the letter from the original post that started this thread. so i'm not sure what you're talking about....

[not_sure_105]

Need some kind of noobs video guide for this, I don't understand a word of it 

I second that.  All this talk of live cd's, Ubuntu, Linux, windows is evil, etc is making no sense.  It seems that along with learning how to use bitcoins comes learning computer programming.