what happens to my wallet when lets say my pc crashes? ( sorry for stupid questions but im new to this )
Along the lines already mentioned by others..... most coins wallets have a "backup" listed under "file" which does just what it says. You can send this backup to another location on your drive, another computer on your network, a usb drive (I keep one handy just for this) . Further security is available by creating passwords and keys but these also need to be recorded and stored.....the further you lock down a wallet, you'll need them if you ever have to recover its data (coins). Help files on wallets generally have instructions on how to do this. it sometimes varies a little but in principle....they all do the same thing.
Keep in mind, every transaction that changes your balances , you should backup.
Just good housekeeping.
So with this, you are saying everytime you make a new tranasction (in or out) you should back up the wallet.dat file. The file (wallet.dat) changes each time the transactions are made correct? Just wanting to make sure this is correct and there isn't anything else you would miss backing up with new trasactions.
To be 100% sure, you should backup after every send transaction or address creation.
When you receive coins to an existing address, your wallet.dat should already have the wallet address/private key pair.
When you send coins, your wallet could potentially create new addresses to hold the change. The change addresses are created in blocks, (I don't know the number but think it's around 100). Unless you checked this you could potentially lose coins if you didn't back up, after new change addresses are created. You would just lose the coins in that address.
As someone already stated, your coins are not actually in your wallet, the wallet just has the keys to unlock your coins.
