I wouldn't trust a CD-R, they are not designed to last that long.  I'd much more likely put it in some service that backs things up with tape every night or has huge redundancy.  Having it physically sit somewhere is silly.  If anything, put a note in a safe deposit box with your encryption key and the location where it's at.  Put it stored electronically with a few different companies.

Leave a copy with your will at your lawyers office

this strategy intrigues me the most.  what you're basically saying is that if i have a million btc in my wallet today i could send 999,999 of them to one of my receiving addresses right now but before i receive them i can close the btc client, disconnect my computer from the internet, back up my wallet.dat and encrypt it, go and stick multiple copies of it everywhere,but the bottom line is that all 999,999 btc will be stored in the block chain out on the network ready and waiting for me to download them to my wallet.dat when i want to recover them in 10 yrs or so.  is that about right?  yes or no answers please.

so why'd the hell did u write that long backup piece and then have the nerve to ask for donations?  this would seem to be the best, non hassle, easiest strategy of all.  forget the USB flash drives, holes in the ground, beds, po boxes, friends, wills, lawyers, safes, vaults, Truecrypt, 7zip, archives, keyloggers, media cards, email attachments.  why do we keep self flaggelating ourselves about this topic.  If btc survives you're a billionaire, if it crashes, all those btc's in cyberspace aren't worth beans anyways.

nah, just joking with you!!  see smiley face?

Nope, they're saying that a wallet doesn't need to be online to send bitcoins to it :-)

Nope. Just restating the coolness.

just use multiple accounts to send between them, each user have wallet created in different place

flash drive is not good idea, if it fails there is small chance of recovery of wallet, backup on 3-4 different mediums and two locations is minimum that you have to do to be safe

personally i have backup of savings wallet on three separate disks in my pc (all with full disk encryption) and copy on external drive and attachment on email account

after i found out that my bitcoins are worth over 6k usd i added dvd-ram, microsd card and base64 copy printed on laser printer on another location

all of course with heavy encryption i know it is a bit paranoid, but different mediums at different locations is a must have for long term backup

you have to use -rescan for the magic to work, though, afaik.


I only have some, but also entertain an extra savings-account.

The wallet.dat does not exist in unencrypted form. The encrypted one I emailed to lots of friends and also put on some removable media.

I've always thought it'd be cool to have a torrent going with a bunch of wallets just in case governments make it a strategy to identify and destroy all the backups that a person might have, or in the case that someone goes into a comma for like a decade and after waking up realizes that all the other backups are gone for some reason.