Author

Topic: Electrum backup (Read 214 times)

legendary
Activity: 1624
Merit: 2481
December 12, 2017, 10:16:01 AM
#3
This was necessary in times where wallets pregenerated a fix amount of addresses. At this time you had to back your wallet.dat up every time a bunch of new addresses have been generated.
Most of the wallets now (including electrum) are using Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallets (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deterministic_wallet).
This means your 12 word seed (which you were prompted to write down at the initialisation of your wallet) is used to create private-/public- keypairs.
You can think of it as a mathematical equation: newAddress = mathFunctionOn(seed) + counter.
So backing up your 12 word seed phrase once is enough to be able to restore your coins into any BIP39 compatible wallet.
hero member
Activity: 2576
Merit: 883
Freebitco.in Support https://bit.ly/2I9BVS2
December 12, 2017, 09:37:18 AM
#2
There is no need to do that. You just need to make sure you have safely stored the seed phrase so you can use it to recover.
newbie
Activity: 6
Merit: 0
December 12, 2017, 09:35:33 AM
#1
Should I backup the wallet file everytime I make a new transaction?
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