This is a very important step not to skip once you start getting coins in your wallet. Your wallet and addresses are stored in a local file, and if your computer crashes you will lose all the coins you have, and unless you have written down your private keys (which you probably haven’t, and this isn’t really recommended) for each address that is in your wallet, you won’t be able to recover them without a backup. Also, any viruses running on your computer are able to find this file and if it isn’t password protected, they can easily steal all of your coins. So do this now!
Get Virus Protection If You Don’t Already Have
The first step, is I would recommend getting/having a good virus scanner for your computer and run it. You should do this before you set your wallet password, to lessen the chance that your password is stolen by reading the keys that you are typing. If you have windows you should download and run Microsoft Security Essentials/Windows Defender. They are free and work pretty well. After that is out of the way, time to move on to setting your password.
Password Protect Your Wallet
I’ve been informed by myturn19 on Reddit that password protecting may crash your client on some PCs and not others. So you may wish to test by backing up your wallet first, unencrypted, before attempting to encrypt it. You can use other encryption tools like trucrypt to store the backup as encrypted if the client gives you problems.
The second step is easy, before you make any backups, you need to come up with a secure password. This password should not be one you use for anything else, and it should contain special characters, uppercase, lower case, numbers and be at least 12 letters long. But you also must make sure that you don’t forget or lose this password. So if this is writing it down and putting it where no one will find it in a burn proof container, or another strategy that you use.. that’s up to you. But just make sure you won’t forget it!
Once you come up with a password, go to Settings > Encrypt Wallet and put your password in there.
To double check your password, go to Help > Debug Window > Console
Type this into the console:
walletpassphrase YourPassword 30
If no error message comes back, you were able to unlock your wallet successfully.
Type:
walletlock
to relock your wallet. Don’t leave it unlocked without needing it. You generally only have to unlock if you will send someone else money or add a new address.
If you have no viruses on your computer and only you know your password, this should be 100% secure. But there is always a chance that your virus scanner didn’t catch something. Avoid downloading any suspicious files and unlocking your wallet unnecessarily. With the rise of cryptocurrencies it will become even more of a danger of being targeted by viruses looking for unsecured wallets. But even if you secured it, you must make sure to back it up!
Backing Up Your Wallet
There are a few very important things to keep in mind when backing up your cryptocurrency (dogecoin, bitcoin, litecoin, etc.) wallets.
The most important thing to know : Backups are NOT in sync.
This is important in two scenarios:
1. If you change your password on one wallet, a copy of the same wallet will not have the same password change. So many as few copies of your wallet as possible while still giving you a way to recover it. I store 1 copy of my wallet online, and 1 on each of my hard drives. Do not keep ANY copies of your unencrypted wallet, as it would be like leaving open windows in your house but bullet proofing and triple dead bolting your front door.
So how can I save my wallet online? My wallet is encrypted 2 times by different components, and renamed as well. So even if I post my wallet online there is no way for anyone to take my coins without first knowing its a wallet, and knowing two separate complex passwords for each level of encryption. If a computer program can break into my wallet, then the whole system for encryption is broken and digital transactions are now useless anyway.
You can most likely get away with just the encryption that the wallet file has when you do “Encrypt” from the program, provided you use a very complex password. Again, it should be 12 characters minimum and have at least 1 of all of these numbers, upper, lower, special character, and not used anywhere else by you!
2. If you add new addresses to your wallet, you risk the chance that they won’t be added to the backup versions of the wallet. Wallets come with 100 premade addresses, that are ready for use. Once you use all 100 of these, your wallet has to create new ones. Any backups of your wallet won’t know any of the new addresses. So if you will be active in creating new addresses, make sure that you update the backups. I also really advise reading my post here for more details of this. Your wallet backup may got out of sync even if you don’t realize.
So, with all that said, when your wallet is encrypted with a strong password, to make a backup, simply go to:
Save the file to a location you prefer. I would then rename the file from wallet.dat to something non obvious like weddingpic.png, and email it to yourself. that should work pretty well. Just remember to rename your file back to wallet.dat before you try and open it back up.
If you are extra paranoid like me, you can try out a program like trucrypt for an additional level of encryption before you upload to the web.
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Ryan Plymire
everytime I put in a password for my wallet the program crashes.
There is a current issue with encrypting wallets on some versions of windows. For now I’d recommend using a program like trucrypt to secure your wallet.
How can I use the wallet.dat after saving it as a backup. Lets assume my PC crashes and all I could save was the wallet.dat.
Using Windows, the Computer does not know how to handle the file, even when dogewallet is installed.
Thanks for your help
Hi Peter, I can put up a detailed tutorial later, but you will want to check out this:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/324/how-can-i-restore-my-wallet
It is probably similar for dogecoin as it is for bitcoin.
+1 for knowing how to restore… I cannot find the place to put the x.dat file to replace the existing one on a new computer/install…
Hi Scott, if you use Windows, (Not sure about xp but this works on 7), open a folder and go to the bar at the type and put in %AppData%, then look for a folder called dogecoin or similar. The wallet goes in there.
Else you need to find C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming and from there look for the dogecoin folder.
I also added a new guide here: http://minedogecoin.com/how-to-restore-your-dogecoin-wallet/
How can I use the wallet.dat that I have saved as a backup. My computer (windows) does not know how to handle the file. Is it not possible to save the whole folder of my wallet?
Thanks for your help
Pingback: A Reminder – Wallet Backups are not in Sync – And Why Your Public Keys Show Conflicting Amounts in the Blockchain | Dogecoin Mining Guide
How can we automate this? Is there a command line for backing up? I would like to schedule a backup and kick it off with a batch file and/or Task Scheduler.
Good idea, yes you could automate it quite easily, I suppose. I can put together a bat file this weekend.
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