Thanks, I'm looking into using offline Electrum in an Ubuntu virtual machine hosted on ESXi 5.5. I've now got to think about how I back it up! Is saving the electrum seed for my cold storage wallet enough? Do I need to save the wallet files?
I consider myself an advanced PC user and using bitcoin in a relatively secure way is not straight forward!
The seed is enough as a backup. Backing up the wallet file presents additional advantages such as a backup of address labels. But, yeah, when push comes to shove the seed is all you really need.
I am not sure what you mean by a virtual machine. Are you running electrum in a virtual machine that is on an online computer? That is not an offline electrum setup. Installing it in a virtual machine does not afford you any additional security. An offline setup is electrum installed on the bare metal OS on a computer that rarely goes online. Finally you can also install electrum on Windows. I wouldn't recommend it but it can be done if you don't like or are unfamiliar with Linux.
I don't have any "spare" bare metal machines. I have ESXi running on bare metal and hosts a lot of VMs for my work. I have created an Ubuntu machine here with whole disk encryption and home encryption. I have updated Ubuntu, installed Electrum and saved the seed words to a piece of paper and I'm also going to put them in a truecrypt volume somewhere in a text file in case I lose the piece of paper. The Ubuntu VM has the vNIC completely removed so it's as if it is offline. The ESXi host cannot communicate with the Ubuntu OS and the disk is encrypted.
For me, this is "good enough". I don't have millions of $ worth of BTC. If my BTC stash was of much higher value then I would invest in something over-the-top paranoid. But this is good enough to me.
I'm going to call my solution Bitcoin Cool Storage, or the Bitcoin fridge because it's not cold, as in frozen, but cool enough for me.
Oh, and thanks for the help!
