Topic: ~ (Read 8764 times)

Congratulations! Slightly surprising that worked, but I guess shred really isn't an 100% reliable way of deleting files these days. Most of the warnings in the shred manpage refer to setups that aren't actually very common...

If you consider the chances of hardware failure, data corruption, user mistakes, and the fact that the wallet use to be hidden somewhere in the system partition (at least make a portable client, so you know where your wallet is!), I think they are biggest threats than viruses.

I did setup a redundant automatic encrypted backup of my wallets in the cloud (on several accounts on live and gmail space) using Cobian backup and Gladinet cloud desktop (both freeware) and I would recommend to anyone to do s.t. like that.

As far as I gather, if it ever ended up in the page file, or if there was ever a backup copy that wasn't shredded, then you can recover it.

One of the reasons I'm interested to see exactly how secure the client side wallet encryption for Bitcoin is going to be.

The shred command is a lie? It doesn't obliterate data?

How appropriate that the BTC resurrection is celebrated with a thread resurrection.

Yeah, I read somewhere that shred doesn't even work on modern (journal-based?) filesystems such as ntfs and ext3. Writes are done on fresh blocks, leaving the original intact until some other write operation overwrites it. which is why you should stop using the disk immediately.

Your wallet should still be on the disk. Good luck finding it, though it is doable.

+1

• 'Empty' wallets might contain value lower than 0.01, eg 0.00154842 btc.
• 'Empty' wallets might contain value much higher than 0.01, if they are somehow corrupt and not reporting the correct balance.
• 'Empty' wallets might contain an address than has been made public (i.e. a donation address) that might receive unexpected funds one day.
• It's easy to move all your unused wallets to an encrypted archive instead. Mark them by the date they were archived or something.

Almost as good as the Voldemort story... Which only wins because it's true.  

You should have encrypted and backed up your eye. Your fault. It's a free market, tough luck.

Guys, I totally messed up. I was hungry, and I didn't have any clean silverware. Taking what I thought to be an empty USB drive, I proceeded to spread peanut butter with it, and jelly (yum - strawberry!) on some bread. But then the dog started barking and totally distracted me. I turned around, and much to my dismay the dang beast leaped up and snatched my USB-knife out of my hands!

There he was, snarfing down my USB drive, when I realized... oh no... my WALLET WAS ON IT.

So, I tried to reach down his throat but it was no good. He didn't like me doing that, and clamped down pretty hard on my hand. I think I broke something too, because I heard a snap. Or maybe that was the USB key case cracking in my dogs throat, I'm not sure. So, I put things away while bleeding copiously everywhere, and sat down clutching a soaked dish-rag as a bandage to check on my wallet backups.

Well, wouldn't you know it, my dog had some kind of coughing fit and BAM, the key flew out of his mouth, into my eye!! Now I'm screaming a lot and the neighbors are starting to shout at me to knock it off, but I can only see out of one eye here - and goddamn does it sting! Stupid dog!

Now I realize I'm losing too much blood, and I think I might be close to shorting out my laptop. The dog is barking, the USB drive is lying somewhere in the room covered in dog drool and bile, perhaps unrecoverable, and my vision is starting to turn into a tunnel of blackness....

fjda4ebnjf.,bmnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

Linux shred does not work on file level. That's a prehistoric tool. Stop using the filesystem with the wallets on it immediately. Scan the whole partition for wallet-like patterns after that.

Go for it! Patches are welcomed.

If you're not a coder, you could offer a bounty instead.

we desperately need wallet management in bitcoin client.

I've got an encrypted backup on a thumbdrive, just in case... probably not going to bother with more than that unless I get a lot more BTC than I have now.

Can't believe the recklessness of people and their wallet.dat files.  It blows me away.  I have less than he lost and I've got it double backed up and offline (not on any computer) unless I'm using it then promptly delete it after double backing it up again.

Remember this is like cash.

And? Have you dumped your system ram ?

Time to add it to the known lost bitcoins thread...

I'm laughing at the pure stupidity of the OP right now.

WHY? WHY WOULD YOU USE SHRED?

A single wallet.dat is the point of failure. You're much more likely to, through human error lose all your wealth if you bury it in a chest in the back yard and then forget when you move.

In my opinion the chance of human error wiping out your entire wealth is much greater with Bitcoin. But of course you could mitigate that risk by storing it with trusted third parties.