Backup Your Wallet Every Time You Add A New Address.

All about the importance of backing up your wallet after you add a new address.

Sometimes The Dood has to learn things the hard way. For some of us, it’s the only way a lesson really sticks. I always preach the importance of backing up your wallet, and also tell the sermon of making a backup for each new address, but sometimes you just don’t heed your own advice.

Case and point. The Dood recently suffered a hard drive crash on his linux system and had to do a hard reboot that corrupted the file system. No big deal I had most everything backed up including my cryptocurrency wallets. Only I just transferred 20,000 reddcoin from another exchange to my computer and used a new wallet address. I’m going to say this loudly, YOU NEED TO BACKUP EVERY TIME YOU CREATE A NEW WALLET ADDRESS!

Now usually I’m really good about this. I mean Reddcoin couldn’t make it much easier for you. Using the QT wallet on my linux machine, you just click File, Backup Wallet and the Reddcoin wallet gives you a .dat file to save. Doesn’t get much simpler than that now does it? You then upload the dat file to a cloud drive (maybe not the best idea for security reasons,) or transfer over to a thumb drive (a better idea, but make multiple copies and put on multiple drives in case of drive failure on the thumb drive.) Easy enough!

So here’s what happened. A while back I buy 20,000 Reddcoin on bittrex at 8 satoshi each. I’m speculating that the market will return to 10 satoshi and I’ll sell 16000 Reddcoin, and I’ll end up making 4000 reddcoin to stake in my wallet for close to free. The market goes down further and I realize that it may not return to 10 satoshi for some time, so I decide to transfer the full 20000 reddcoin to my wallet and stake them all till the price returns to 10 satoshi. I create a new wallet address and I label the address “Sell 16K At 10” or something like that and send the coin to that address. After I do it, I think maybe I’m better off just clearing the wallet out, sending all the coin to my electrum wallet on my phone, and then redeposit it in one lump sum for stronger staking weight. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll do that tonight after dinner. No need to make a backup for the new wallet address. What could possibly go wrong? LOL Famous last words of the foolhardy.

Murphy’s Law, comes back and bites The Dood in the ass! So after dinner, I have a computer issue, end up corrupting the file system in my home partition, and can’t get my computer to boot. Luckily 20,000 reddcoin is only about 80 cents USD no big deal, but to make a long story just a little longer, I had the backup for the original wallet.dat with my main stake. I ended up losing the 20,000 reddcoin because I didn’t make a new wallet.dat with the new address. Learning things the hard way is sometimes the best way. It could of been worse, and chances are if it had been 50 or 100 dollars of reddcoin I’d of been a little more cautious.

Anyway, don’t make this nOOb mistake. If you add an address to your wallet, back up that dat file so you have the new address. YOU NEED TO DO THIS EVERY TIME YOU ADD AN ADDRESS TO YOUR WALLET!

Original post found on my blog on bitcoindood.com