Author Topic: BTS Wallet Best Practices and Danger Areas  (Read 16181 times)

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Offline ripplexiaoshan

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Offline bitmeat

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But people who backed up their wallets prior to 0.4.10 should still be able to recover at some point, right?

I literally had no other way of getting back on track. When installing new software kept crashing with the old data, I wiped the data folder and imported the old JSON wallet with fresh blockchain data. Heck even that was crashing for a few versions. Finally in 0.4.10 it is somewhat back on track.

With the exception of a few orders probably imported from the old wallet that I can't seem to be able to cancel due to "invalid order type"
(details already sent, BM is looking at it)

Offline soniq

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Offline bytemaster

Many users have been reporting bugs where balances appear to go missing or orders they cannot cancel.   We are working on solutions to increase the robustness of the wallet in all use cases, but for now most wallet problems are the result of the wallet being used in an "unsupported" manner. 

1) Do not use the same wallet on two computers.
  - If you do this the deterministic key generation will get out of sync.  This can result in missing balances and/or orders using the same key and thus difficult to cancel.  We are enhancing the wallet to be able to handle this more gracefully.   That said, one wallets will not be able to see the receiver of outgoing transactions sent from the other wallet.   

2) Do not attempt to restore from an "old backup"
 -  While technically the purpose of a backup is to prevent you from losing funds, the backups at this point in time are there to allow *future versions* to have a hope at recovering all of your funds.  Backups are generated automatically every time you upgrade the wallet.   When you upgrade only use the "most recent" backup.   Generally speaking you shouldn't ever have to dive into a backup file that is older than your last transaction.  While future versions may allow you to recover all of your funds, your transaction history may never quite recover all of the data you may want. 

3) Do not attempt to use more than one "account" per wallet if you want to be able to easily recover from a backup
  - Based upon the current wallet code, if you use more than one account and attempt to recover keys it will not be able to allocate market orders back to the original account.  You will be able to recover the funds/orders to one of your accounts but it may not be the same account as the original order.

Prior to version 0.4.10 of BTSX, the one time keys used to send funds to someone else were not deterministically generated.  If you attempt to recover from an old backup you will not be able to read the memo or destination account for these funds.  You will still see that it came out of your account.    0.4.10 and later generate the one time keys deterministically which will allow the wallet to brute force determine who the funds went to.   

The moral of the story is this (for average users):

1) Use a wallet on only one computer
2) Only use one account per wallet
3) Backup regularly
4) Don't attempt an import from an "old" backup.

Once the various bugs are fixed these things will become easier to use and your wallet will be less likely to end up in an odd state.
« Last Edit: November 07, 2014, 07:56:14 pm by vikram »
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