Do you need to backup the wallet file?

[dejuan]

With Electrum, do you need to backup the wallet file?

Or is it enough to have the seed in case you want to restore the wallet?

It seems that backing up the wallet file would preserve contacts and labels but just wanted to make sure. Also wanted to know if not backing up the wallet file meant losing your transaction history

Thanks for any help

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[Abdussamad]

It seems that backing up the wallet file would preserve contacts and labels but just wanted to make sure.

Yes that's right. You can get access to your coins if you restore from seed but you won't get access to that metadata.

Also wanted to know if not backing up the wallet file meant losing your transaction history

Depends on what you mean by this. All the transactions are recorded on the blockchain so when you restore from seed your wallet will show them all on the history tab. But labels you set will not be shown because those are only recorded in the wallet file (unless you use the label sync plugin).

There's more info about backing up your wallet here.

[nc50lc]

-snip- Also wanted to know if not backing up the wallet file meant losing your transaction history

It's also worth mentioning that your Electrum needs to be online to sync your transaction history after you restore from SEED.

It seems that backing up the wallet file would preserve contacts and labels but just wanted to make sure.

Yes, but it includes frozen UTXOs and addresses.

[dejuan]

Great thank you very much all

[BitMaxz]

If you want to backup metadata (such as label to transaction & address), then you need to backup your wallet file.

Even if you're not, having extra backup won't hurt, as long as you uses strong password.

Additional for this:

If you use the backup seed for recovering your wallet you can only recover addresses and transaction history but the label and contact is not included when recovering it with seed backup.

However, you can backup or export both contact and labels from Electrum.



This is just another option if you want to separate the backups from address, contacts to labels.