Where is a command line sticky for Bitcoin QT?

Quicker_777

newbie

Activity: 58

Merit: 0

Quote from: grue on May 26, 2013, 11:38:13 AM

all the command line options: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin

to backup your wallet, just copy+paste %appdata%\bitcoin\wallet.dat

Thank you for the advice and link! Very helpful. I looked through the Wiki some more and found another very helpful page for others reading this post: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet

Enjoy!

grue

legendary

Activity: 2058

Merit: 1452

all the command line options: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin

to backup your wallet, just copy+paste %appdata%\bitcoin\wallet.dat

DannyHamilton

legendary

Activity: 3472

Merit: 4801

Quote from: Quicker_777 on May 26, 2013, 09:36:22 AM

I'm just lookin' for the basics - maybe I missed that somewhere in the GUI, but I don't think so. Huh

Does anybody know of a good place that walks through the steps for:

1) Backing up all your private keys / accessing what those keys are
2) Steps on how to restore a wallet with your private keys using command line?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Due to the way Bitcoin-Qt handles the "change" when you send transactions, it is a very bad idea to try to just back up "private keys" of a Bitcoin-Qt wallet that you are actively using. You really need to backup the entire wallet.dat file on a regular basis, and it would be a good idea to keep at least the three most recent backups in case you have issues restoring one of them.

If you really want to access the private keys, you can do so. You can use "listunspent" to get a list of all the unspent outputs in the wallet. Then you can look up each of those transaction outputs (either at a website such as blockchain.info or with the getrawtransaction and decoderawtransaction commands). Once you have a list of addresses that have outputs associated with them, you can use dumpprivkey with each address to get the private keys. Later if you want to import any of these private keys into Bitcoin-Qt you can use importprivkey.