Protecting my offline wallets from physical theft

[7Priest7]

Harddrive faillure odds are bigger than theft. So backup your wallet on 2 USB sticks to be sure.

Just plain untrue, if we look at burglaries for 2011.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hb9411.pdf
If we look purely at portable electronics stolen that year 978,700.
There is about 2 personal electronics stolen each minute(This is in the U.S. only).

Even if we sampled every person with a post 2000 hdd (including all countries).
We would get nowhere near 2 hdd crashes per minute.


Backing up on USB Sticks is still wise.
Backing up in general is wise.
If you are incredibly sure of your encryption you could do a usenet backup.

[Coma]

I'd recommend encrypted DVD

Do you mean encrypting the dvd completely or a simple openssl aes file encription would be ok?

[bitpop]

Use a Millenium DVD

[Dabs]

What is true:

1. Hard drives fail.
2. USB flash memory fail.
3. Anything physical gets stolen.
4. Anything physical decays, rots, or deteriorates.
5. Human error (yourself, or others) can destroy your media.

Eventually.

Backup backup backup. Different media. Different locations.

Encrypt so no one else can read it.

Backup so you can find it in case you lose the first one.

[bitcoinrocks]

If you ever restore the wallet to spend BTC, make sure to update all the cold backups so that you capture all the change addresses.

This worries me.  So if I back up my private key and continue to use my wallet, the backed-up private key does not back up my entire balance at some point?

Depends on your client. If you re using electrum or armory, you re ok.

To confirm, I'm not OK if I'm using multibit?  That's enough to get me to switch away from multibit.

What about the QT clients for the altcoins?  Do they have this deficiency?

[davedx]

I encrypted mine with the client, then encrypted the wallet.dat and emailed it to myself.

[StevenS]

You should also save a paper backup, unencrypted, with information explaining what it is, in a safe deposit box so that your heirs can have your bitcoin when you die.