Topic: Wallet Safekeeping - Best Practices - page 2. (Read 5617 times)

DVD-R or CD-R would be a good idea because they are cheap and guaranteed read-only.

I strongly believe bitcoin-qt source code contributors would do their best not to compromise old version wallet...
With many years, attackers may find a security hole, then dev team may have to compromise old version wallet file format. This case will be a very big news and dev team would announce proper wallet upgrade guide... I can't imagine more details for now...

If any attacker can hack bitcoin(or blockchain) by completely dominating dev team, so quickly that lots of wallets could be already stolen, that will be the end of bitcoin. Even alt-coins will lose trust that case. That could boost physical precious metal.

I would backup on multiple different mediums. CD, USB, HDD, old SD cards. As well as store them in various locations like parents house, friends house, in-laws house etc

You could also use deterministic wallets that generate a bunch of pseudorandom addresses from a random key. This is how electrum does it and I like their approach very much. You can just store a 12-word passphrase in your safe, or even just in your brain if you're careful (but brain+safe+completely separate USB keys somewhere is best).
Of course you have to be careful about how you're going to generate the random key for those. But I find dice work very nicely!

I appreciate the response. This pretty much answers my question. Yes, of course multiple immediate copies on multiple external storage. Perhaps even burning a copy of wallet.dat, a copy in .rar and .zip of the same file over multiple dvd copies would achieve the same purpose.

What about code changes or even "forking" as I have seen with some Alt-Coins. Does that not require some changes to the wallet.dat to remain valid?

Yes, it will catch up.

IMO,
5 years of time, the HDD or USB stick could be corrupted in hardware level. Low probability but could happen.
Preparing 2~3 USB sticks and storing identical wallet.dat file will be safer to keep it long. Also, check both USB's condition once a month, by mounting onto "linux or mac, offline computer" I wouldn't consider windows as a safe computer.

Lastly, if you encrypted wallet file, 5 years could be long enough time to forget your own password. There's no such thing as "reset password". Be very careful not to forget.

Hi,

I would like to obtain some clarification on what are the technical best practices to safekeeping wallets. I apologize for my newbieness on this matter, but I am looking for some clear and concise advice on the following:

a. If I understand correctly, our unique wallet data is held in wallet.dat -- this is the most important file that uniquely represents our identifier on the bitcoin network.

This would be my hypothetical question.

Let's pretend that I downloaded a fresh Bitcoin client, extracted my address. Then immediately backed-up my wallet.dat on some type of offline storage for example. Then placed this offline storage in a vault

If I was to send myself payments to this address and in 5 years for example -- I would place wallet.dat back into another Bitcoin wallet, would it catch-up and find all the payments that were ever sent to that wallet?

Essentially, my proposed approach is to instantiate the Bitcoin Client once to have a wallet.dat generated and to obtain the associated address. Delete the wallet.dat for this not to be active on a computer connected to a network. Then store offline (hack-proof), and simply use the address to bank coins.  

Are there any technical risks to this approach? E.g. Major Code changes that would negate such storage methodology?

Thanks in advance.