multiple offline wallets for long term storage

[18stops]

I'm trying to consider best practice for long term offline storage, by 'long term' I mean years and at the very least 3-5 years.

I need to consider that operating systems may change, wallet software might change .. etc
and the version of the wallet I'm using today (Electrum / OSX) may be compromised by the time I retrieve.
By splitting my coins amongst several offline wallets I hope to minimize risk when I revisit them.

In order to do this, can I just simply swap the electrum.dat files in and out of their folder?
For osx users: is there another wallet client I should be considering?

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[DannyHamilton]

I'm trying to consider best practice for long term offline storage, by 'long term' I mean years and at the very least 3-5 years.

I need to consider that operating systems may change, wallet software might change .. etc
and the version of the wallet I'm using today (Electrum / OSX) may be compromised by the time I retrieve.
By splitting my coins amongst several offline wallets I hope to minimize risk when I revisit them.

In order to do this, can I just simply swap the electrum.dat files in and out of their folder?
For osx users: is there another wallet client I should be considering?

For long term storage, you should seriously consider a paper based wallet.

[18stops]

For long term storage, you should seriously consider a paper based wallet.

 I realize paper has its advantages, and it may be used as a substitute or in addition to digital offline, however I really want to avoid debating paper vs digital offline because I'm sure thats been covered.

Instead I'd love to explore best practices for digital offline and in particular, how to make the electrum client (or other cleints) act across several wallets

[Terk]

Agree about paper wallets or some digital version of it, i.e. some encrypted file containing all your private keys. In general - for long term, store rather keys than wallet files. This way you won't be vulnerable to future versions of your wallet software being backwards incompatible or totally nonexistent in a few years.

Splitting funds into several wallets is a good idea, but remember to keep these wallets in separate places as well. There's not much advantage of having bitcoins splited over five wallets if you store private keys for all of them in one place, so if it becomes compromised, all your wallets will be at risk.

Also, always store multiple copies of your wallets in different geographical locations. There are fires, earthquakes and all sort of stuff than could destroy your data.

There's one more thing to consider when storing wallets/keys for very long term. You probably want them encrypted using some strong passphrase and if they are proper cold wallets, that means you won't access these keys for years. You'd better make sure you'll still remember your 50-chars long encryption passphrase five years from now.

[18stops]

Agree about paper wallets or some digital version of it, i.e. some encrypted file containing all your private keys. In general - for long term, store rather keys than wallet files. This way you won't be vulnerable to future versions of your wallet software being backwards incompatible or totally nonexistent in a few years.

Maybe this is what Danny Hamilton meant in post 2?  I hadn't considered this but  I'm now reinterpreting his post.

How do I get the keys from electrum?

[w1R903]

I'm trying to consider best practice for long term offline storage, by 'long term' I mean years and at the very least 3-5 years.

Best practice for long-term storage of Bitcoins is storing the private keys to your wallet on acid-free paper.  Point blank.  Digital files can and will be corrupted, no matter what format you use.  They *probably* wouldn't become corrupted after only 3-5 years, but I certainly wouldn't risk a large sum of money on it.  Paper files in a fire-proof safe are the only safe long-term option.

You can dump private keys from your wallet using any of the common clients: bitcoin-qt, Electrum, Armory, blockchain.info, etc.  Just make sure you delete the wallets from your non-backup locations so they don't accidentally given away with an old computer.

If you're worried about your safe getting compromised, you can encrypt the bare keys before you print them out using gpg or something similar.  Just make sure you can remember the key!  Store it in another location away from the safe since you'll likely forget it after 5 years.