Can bitcoin hard drives be backed up?

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Gordy7

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#280882 17-Jan-2021 20:40

I don't know much about bitcoin at all.
Apparently some guy threw out a hard drive with all his bitcoin info on it.
Surely if a hard drive content is valuable then a backup is a must.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/01/15/uk-man-makes-last-ditch-effort-to-recover-lost-bitcoin-hard-drive.html

Gordy

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freitasm

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#2637066 17-Jan-2021 21:13

It depends. If it is a hard drive, sure it can be duplicated. But is it encrypted?

Also there are drives that are hardware encrypted and you can't really do much.

The story doesn't exactly tell us details that would help determine it.

systemd

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#2637074 17-Jan-2021 22:00

A Bitcoin wallet is just a single wallet.dat file. Can easily be backed up, moved around and so-forth.

Assuming the hard drive hasn't been totally destroyed from eight years in a landfill, this is totally recoverable.

freitasm

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#2637075 17-Jan-2021 22:14

systemd:

A Bitcoin wallet is just a single wallet.dat file. Can easily be backed up, moved around and so-forth.

Assuming the hard drive hasn't been totally destroyed from eight years in a landfill, this is totally recoverable.

Yes, that's the case if he had made a copy. The OP question was "Can bitcoin hard drives be backed up" and the article doesn't say if the person was looking for a file only out of normal drive or if the drive was hardware encrypted e.g. Encrypted HDDs/SSDs - iStorage (UK) (istorage-uk.com) in which case the owner wouldn't make a copy of said file into a non-secure drive because that would defeat the purpose, so assume in these cases any copy would be into a secure device.

Also the article doesn't say but the bitcoins could actually be stored on a hardware wallet e.g. Hardware - Choose your wallet - Bitcoin - which the journalist might describe as a "bitcoin hard drive" but are really encrypted USB sticks.

So, really, as I said, not enough information in the article.

concordnz

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#2637243 18-Jan-2021 10:59

If I remember the original article correctly (when it ran in the media 3-4 years ago. - It was a HDD out of a Dell laptop, which he threw away. - not it was not encrypted. (but he will still need his password to open the wallet.)

As systemd said - if you want to copy/back up a wallet,
You only need to copy the wallet.dat & make sure you always know your password.

Whether you then encrypt it or what you store it on is a separate question/decision.

freitasm

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#2637244 18-Jan-2021 11:02

If that is the case, then the guy was extremely dumb in not having a file backup anywhere.

concordnz

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#2637246 18-Jan-2021 11:04

He had no backup - which is why he was desperate to find the original laptop drive.

Gordy7

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#2637251 18-Jan-2021 11:17

From my brief read the guy bought the bitcoin many years ago at the very low price.... so he is not out of pocket by much.
Now he wants to reap the returns on the unforseen high price of bitcoin.

Gordy

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concordnz

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#2637255 18-Jan-2021 11:29

At the time he threw away the HDD, bitcoin was essentially worthless & he didn't care.
(hardware wallets may not have even been around at that time either)

It would be no different to a particular 1980's/1990's computer game originals suddenly becoming worth something.
I'm sure all of us have thrown away plenty of old games which we no longer play & they have no resale value. - but if one were suddenly worth millions - we would have a look in case they were still sitting in an old box, or toy with the idea of checking out the landfill site we dumped them.

(we wouldn't be dumb for throwing them away - they simply were worthless at the time.)

nova

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#2637547 18-Jan-2021 19:51

concordnz: At the time he threw away the HDD, bitcoin was essentially worthless & he didn't care.

According to the article it was 7,500 bitcoins. At the start of 2013 these were worth over $75,000, at the end of the year they got to $7.5 million. It sounded like he did care, but by the time he realised it was an impossible mission, as a few month had elapsed. On the other hand, when he mined them originally he probably didn't invest that much.

This story seems true, but the thing with bitcoin is it would be easy to make up a story like this, and it would be very hard to disprove. You could even use the blockchain to identify some unspent bitcoins, and only the owner of those bitcoins could disprove it. But 99% of journalists would probably take your story at face value, and wouldn't even try to validate it.

Stories like this could be used to help pump up the value of bitcoins further, they are basically free advertising. So if you had a lot of bitcoin, there is quite a bit of incentive to promote these types of stories, and make people realise what they are missing out on. And without continued momentum, eventually bitcoin will decline in value. Bitcoin is a failed experiment at creating a useful currency, but has had great success as an asset class, for people who are happy to have a purely virtual asset.

And the answer to the original question is that it would be pretty easy to back the data up.

Behodar

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#2637550 18-Jan-2021 20:04

concordnz: At the time he threw away the HDD, bitcoin was essentially worthless & he didn't care.

I only had a little over 1 BTC and I sold it back in 2013 :(

My leftover 'cents' are now worth significantly more than 1 BTC was back then! I need to find some way of selling them one of these days...

freitasm

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#2637564 18-Jan-2021 20:51

Behodar:

concordnz: At the time he threw away the HDD, bitcoin was essentially worthless & he didn't care.

I only had a little over 1 BTC and I sold it back in 2013 :(

My leftover 'cents' are now worth significantly more than 1 BTC was back then! I need to find some way of selling them one of these days...

I have an account with a specific exchange. I convert any crypto I receive (a few dollars here and there but nothing big) into GBP balance, then withdraw to a UK bank account number provided by a travel card/international payment service. I then send the GBP as NZD to my BNZ account. It all usually takes less than an hour.