How to store wallet on USB and load it with the Bitcoin Core?

[Draqla]

Hello,

I would like to ask the community how I could properly store my "Encrypted Wallet" on a USB and then load that wallet with my Bitcoin client.

Thank you!

[achow101]

Move the wallet.dat file from Bitcoin Core's datadir to your USB drive. When you want to use it, move it back to the datadir. Alternatively you can move the entire datadir to the USB drive but this will require your USB drive to have over 120 GB of free space and it will make Bitcoin Core perform much slower.

[achow101]

This is a very bad solution, to move it all the time.
I thought there is a more professional way of doing it.

Bitcoin Core is not designed for you to be able to add and remove wallets at will. It is not designed for you to use wallets that are not in the Bitcoin Core datadir.

Any knowledge on how does the Trezor or Nano Ladger do it?

Besides the fact that Trezor and Ledgers do not work with Bitcoin Core, they also do not do anything with wallet files. Rather a wallet has to support the Trezor and Ledger hardware interaction APIs and send the device whatever data via those APIs.

[HI-TEC99]

This is a very bad solution, to move it all the time.
I thought there is a more professional way of doing it.

If you want to store your "Encrypted Wallet" permanently on a USB you can install the whole of Bitcoin core to the USB, then follow the instructions in the quote to make it use the wallet.dat on your USB.

... Right click the shortcut and select "properties" from the list that appears.

Click the "shortcut" tab in the properties window, then look for the first text box in it labelled "target". Copy the line of text below and paste it to the end of whatever is in the "target" text box.

-datadir=.

Make sure you copy the leading space and trailing . from the line of text above.

The text box should look something like this.



Afterwards click the "apply" button, then the "OK" button to close the shortcut properties window.

Copy your encrypted wallet.dat file to the same folder on the USB that contains bitcoin-qt.exe.

Double click the new shortcut to run Bitcoin core. Don't double click bitcoin-qt.exe because that will make Bitcoin core look for a wallet.dat file on your computer rather than on the USB.

As achow101 says your USB wll need to be over 120 GB to run Bitcoin core from it.