Four questions about backups and bitcoind

[chipbike]

Hi all,

I need some help understanding how to backup a wallet.

1 - I will have a bitcoind daemon running that will generate various addresses each day, because of this I think I will need to do backups every day. Is this correct?

2 - Is "wallet.dat" all I have to backup? I only need to make a copy of this file? $ cp wallet.dat /home/my_user ?

3 - I can make the backups with bitcoind running?

4 - How to restore? Imagine that the server goes away. All I need is to reinstall bitcoind and replace the "wallet.dat" with my backed up "wallet.dat"?

Give me some clues.

Thanks.

[andytoshi]

1. Yes, if you are constantly generating new addresses you'll have to make frequent backups. Though you can set the keypool size past 100 if this is a concern.
2. Yes, only wallet.dat.
3. I do this a lot because I forget that bitcoind is running, and it appears to work fine (knock on wood). But no, as long as bitcoind is running the wallet database is opened and may be in a weird state.
4. Yeah, just drop wallet.dat into the right place. (Don't do this while bitcoind is running!)