making a savings account wallet

[luv2drnkbr]

I want to make a "savings account" wallet to keep the bulk of my btc in, but I'm scared to do it, cause I'm not very tech-savvy and the cost of screwing up is huge..  So I want to ask:  I have the main client currently installed on Windows 7, and the data dir is in the %appdata%\Roaming\bitcoin folder.  (My first was installed using the binary installer.)  Can I just download the Windows zip file from bitcoin.org and place a completely new installation elsewhere on my computer?  Or will that mess things up having two installations of it?  Obviously, the "new" location is going to be a Truecrypt file container either on a thumb drive or in my Dropbox folder, but again, I'm worried about doing this because I don't want to mess things up.

Should I instead not even bother and just delete the wallet.dat file (after making a backup of course!) and replace it with a new one and run bitcoin with -rescan?  Then replace the original and just send my btc to an address on the newer wallet.  Would that work?

I feel like either of these would work just fine, but I'm not 100% sure and I don't want to try it, fuck up, and be screwed!

Now then, I have a second, completely unrelated couple of question.  The first one is, is there a way to verify an address is an actual address.  Like I want to verify that the address is real and exists without sending money to it.  Is that possible?  I saw somebody made a program that does that, and I'm curious how they went about it.

And finally, is there a patch/addon for Windows that can import/export addresses easily.  For if I wanted to use BitBills...

Thanks for the help guys!!!

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[Timo Y]

1. No need for two installations. Just replace wallet.dat with your current working wallet.

2. The original bitcoin client won't send to invalid addresses. The safest way to go about a savings wallet is to create it offline, back up encrypted vesion, then send coins. Use block explrorer to check if coins have arrived.

Try doing several practice runs with 0.01 btc first.

[vuce]

2. The original bitcoin client won't send to invalid addresses.

Isn't every address of sufficient length valid, even though no one actually owns it (yet)?

[Meni Rosenfeld]

2. The original bitcoin client won't send to invalid addresses.

Isn't every address of sufficient length valid, even though no one actually owns it (yet)?

No. You will note that if you go to the "send coins" interface and make a small change to the address, the client will notice this is not a valid address. I think this has something to do with the Base 58 encoding.

[foo]

The easiest way to switch between "accounts" is to use the -datadir switch. Just point bitcoin at an empty directory with this switch and you can use that as your savings account.

[just_someguy]

No. You will note that if you go to the "send coins" interface and make a small change to the address, the client will notice this is not a valid address. I think this has something to do with the Base 58 encoding.

I believe the last couple of bytes is a checksum of the address.

[Alex Beckenham]

The easiest way to switch between "accounts" is to use the -datadir switch. Just point bitcoin at an empty directory with this switch and you can use that as your savings account.

Although, that method will require multiple copies of the block chain.

I think along with a -datadir switch, it'd be handy if bitcoin had a -walletfile switch.

[luv2drnkbr]

The easiest way to switch between "accounts" is to use the -datadir switch. Just point bitcoin at an empty directory with this switch and you can use that as your savings account.

Although, that method will require multiple copies of the block chain.

I think along with a -datadir switch, it'd be handy if bitcoin had a -walletfile switch.

Yeah a -walletfile switch would be awesome.  I did indeed just make a new 1GB truecrypt file and stuck an entire new datadir in it.  Maybe not the most effecient, but whatever, it worked.  That's all I care about.