Bitcoin-QT grandfather - father - son wallet backup built in? #2692

issue saltmaster openend this issue on May 24, 2013

saltmaster commented at 9:39 am on May 24, 2013: none

Having recently suffered a fairly minor loss due to wallet corruption, and being a little lax with backups (hence the only minor loss), I was wondering if anyone would be inspired to build a simple backup system into the QT client, i.e. whenever a spend transaction is made and a new change address is generated, a copy of the wallet.dat is made named for example wallet.dat.backup, and a copy of any pre-existing wallet.dat.backup is renamed as wallet.dat.old deleting any previous wallet.dat.old file. I know some people may see this as ‘your fault, you should back up properly’, but in the real world how many people do this every single time a new keypair is made?
luke-jr commented at 9:52 am on May 24, 2013: member

Backups on the same hard drive/location aren’t really proper backups… You also don’t need to backup every new keypair - only every 100. Future versions will require a single one-time backup, so putting effort into automated backups like this might be redundant.
laanwj commented at 10:10 am on May 24, 2013: member

It could give a reminder when a new backup is needed either based on the number of keypool keys generated or “keypoololdest”, that was my idea with #2637.

Maybe a “backup status” on the overview page that shows this info…
laanwj added the label Wallet on May 2, 2014
jonasschnelli commented at 3:14 pm on November 10, 2014: contributor

I’d like to invest into this direction. If the Bitcoin-Qt client should be enduser capable for non IT-people we should support some kind of backup function.

What if the client would have a periodical or event-based backup routine? Even for HD Wallets (who’s the state implementing this anyway?) a backup would make sense.

Backups could be only allowed if the client has a encrypted wallet. Backups should be possible to internal storage (with warning) and/or external storage.

Internal storage could be “wallet.dat.backup20150101” in the same directory or backups to user defined URIs on the “local” filesystem.

Now to earn some critics: i would love the possibility to make a backup of my [encrypted!] wallet to my dropbox / google drive or other “external space”. At least it should be possible to use FTP/SFTP/S3 as external storage.

bitcoind/Bitcoin-QT should give a nice interface to the available backups.

For hardcore bitcoind users it’s might be needless. But for simple endusers it could be a life-saver.
laanwj added the label Feature on Feb 9, 2016
laanwj removed the label Refactoring on Feb 9, 2016
MarcoFalke commented at 5:15 pm on July 16, 2018: member

Closing. Now that all newly created wallets are HD, I think a feature like this is no longer required.
MarcoFalke closed this on Jul 16, 2018
MarcoFalke locked this on Sep 8, 2021

Contributors
saltmaster luke-jr laanwj jonasschnelli MarcoFalke

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Feature GUI Wallet