Multiple wallets?

[brockacre]

Does the principle of not placing all your eggs in one basket apply to bitcoins? Is there any advantage to setting up multiple wallets and if so, how? Also, is there any reason to back up the entire bitcoin data directory over just the wallet .dat?

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[CIYAM]

Does the principle of not placing all your eggs in one basket apply to bitcoins? Is there any advantage to setting up multiple wallets and if so, how? Also, is there any reason to back up the entire bitcoin data directory over just the wallet .dat?

Not placing all your eggs in one basket is sage advice about any sort of investment.

Multiple wallets are not really necessary provided that you have tested that your "backup wallet" was correctly backed up - to be sure of this you really need to do a trial "disaster recovery" and verify that your procedure works as expected (perhaps best done with a "backup computer").

Brain wallets are another potential approach (in which case I think the use of multiple addresses is probably a good idea in case you are unable to recall the password for one or are being forced to reveal passwords under duress). Bear in mind though that coming up with a secure enough password that you won't forget is not a trivial task for most.

The only reason to backup more than wallet.dat is to speed up the recovery time (as a rescan won't be required).

[brockacre]

I guess that what I was thinking was that you could have at least two wallets. One that would be like a savings account where you would hoard bitcoins as an investment and one that you could use for online commerce. The savings account one would be in back up form only. NOT on your computer and therefor safe from hacking. So if your wallet is hacked, you would only lose that which was on your computer. Idk, I'm new to this and I'm trying to make my investment as secure as possible. 

[CIYAM]

I guess that what I was thinking was that you could have at least two wallets. One that would be like a savings account where you would hoard bitcoins as an investment and one that you could use for online commerce. The savings account one would be in back up form only. NOT on your computer and therefor safe from hacking. So if your wallet is hacked, you would only lose that which was on your computer. Idk, I'm new to this and I'm trying to make my investment as secure as possible. 

Okay - this does make sense and is indeed a sensible approach - a "brain wallet" is also something worth considering for at least holding a portion of the "savings".

If you want to be super secure you might want to consider buying a cheap computer and generate the savings wallet on it without ever connecting to the internet. The tricky part is getting the software needed onto this computer if you don't want to trust say a Linux distro designed for this purpose (there is at least one or two such distros mentioned in threads on this Forum).

Another way that this can be at least partially solved is if you use a brain wallet that is a single HTML page that can be used offline (https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v1.6-SHA1-162d1ff4fd1e09222cbaca6c282672ee6c195e1b.html) but you still have the problem of getting that single HTML page on the PC.

If you don't want to trust using a USB flash drive to accomplish this then it is possible to get a USB to USB "serial cable" and then you would need to investigate using something like Zmodem in order to copy the file (I think the guy building Armory was looking into that very idea).