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Topic: Move bitcoin wallet from one computer to another? (Read 54096 times)

sr. member
Activity: 240
Merit: 250
Ah, i see - thanks a lot!
legendary
Activity: 1512
Merit: 1036
About 10 minutes on a normal wallet and PC. Longer for many addresses in the wallet and on a slow CPU. You don't need to rescan as long as there is no chance that wallet received payments while it was "down".
sr. member
Activity: 240
Merit: 250
Its because of a migration to a bigger server. And I need the wallet because there are multiple "user accounts" inside...
How long does it take to rescan in general?
full member
Activity: 168
Merit: 100
You could also just transfer the coins to a new wallet on the new machine.
member
Activity: 62
Merit: 10
use online wallet
legendary
Activity: 1512
Merit: 1036
Just closing bitcoin, copying the wallet.dat (after moving but not deleting any previous important wallet), and restarting with the bitcoind -rescan option is sufficient to move a wallet to another machine. If you don't already have a blockchain downloaded, it will be a long time before that bitcoin is ready though; copying an existing complete 12GB datadir can save a day of re-downloading and processing the blockchain.

I can't think of many scenarios outside of restoring a backup where you'd put an existing wallet.dat up on a server.
sr. member
Activity: 240
Merit: 250
And what should I do if i have a webserver and want to keep the offline time low? I cant wait until some GB are transferred between the server.. Or is there no other stable possibility?
legendary
Activity: 1512
Merit: 1036
You'll want to just copy the whole Bitcoin data directory with the wallet.dat and subdirectories, so you don't have to download the blockchain again.
sr. member
Activity: 240
Merit: 250
Is it true, that nowadays (after version 0.3.2), you can just copy the wallet to the new location - without --reindex or deleting the bulk datas?
legendary
Activity: 2506
Merit: 1010
Do people ever transfer BTC by just mailing someone a wallet.dat?

You'ld want to encrypt it first -- using TrueCrypt, for example, and then send only the encrypted archive:
  http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet
legendary
Activity: 1414
Merit: 1000
HODL OR DIE
Do people ever transfer BTC by just mailing someone a wallet.dat?
legendary
Activity: 1072
Merit: 1181
For older clients you need to delete blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat, and let it redownload the block chain...
sr. member
Activity: 493
Merit: 250
Don't trust "BBOD The Best Futures Exchange"
For anyone googling this in the future - note that the -rescan switch was added in the 3.20 client, I ran into problems when I was working with two wallets because I was using the 3.19 client and trying to use -rescan.
sr. member
Activity: 406
Merit: 256
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet#Locating_BitCoin_s_data_directory

Copy the wallet from that directory on the old computer to the new one, then run the bitcoin client with the -rescan switch.
newbie
Activity: 18
Merit: 0
I have a new computer and I'm trying to figure out how to move my bitcoin wallet over to this new machine. How can I accomplish this?
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