You can get the masterkey any time with
$ /usr/bin/gocryptfs-xray -dumpmasterkey myfs/gocryptfs.conf
Whenever you print passwords in the terminal delete history with
$ cat /dev/null > ~/.bash_history ; history -c
But what happens if Electrum won't start for some reason (or your computer dies) and you must manually copy the wallet file somewhere else?
It looks like each wallet file is encrypted by itself, so now there's an AES-encrypted file that you somehow have to decrypt before you can open it.
How can the wallet be decrypted in such cases? I have read from the tool website that there is a master key which allows for access but I'm not quite sure how to use it off-line if it's only printed at mount time:
Wallets definitely sound like important data to me. Does this mean we're also going to have an offline wallet backup stashed away somewhere on an external disk or USB?
If you decide to use the gocryptfs for any data, there is a
gocryptfs.conf file that you have to backup in case it gets corrupted, or you can you use the masterkey instead.
My concept to avoid being sorry as much as possible is make
copies, copies, copies ...I always have 3 bootable OSs with all their programs (home dir, etc) on my hard disk. I also have 2 external disks and each one has another 3 copies of the complete OS with everything. So
at any given time I have 9 copies of everything that I try to update 3 times per month.
Every time I update, I boot a different clone just to make sure everything works. By the way you can copy the OS partition without loosing any file attributes from anywhere with
# rsync -aAHXsh --delete --preallocate --info=progress2,stats2 <source> <dest>
You have to run this as root from a live USB.
After doing this you have to change UUIDs of the updated partitions
to get the UUIDs
$ sudo nano <clone-path>/etc/fstab
to update UUIDs for /, /boot/efi and [SWAP] (if you have a swap partition)
You can boot with the
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ bootloader and install grub again with
sudo grub-install /dev/sdX
sudo update-grub
This means I also have 9 functional copies of my electrum wallets always.
In older times that I did not have the above concept, when I got a new hard disk, I created a new wallet with my seed.
Mind you external clones are not portable to other systems. They are bound to the system they were copied from.