I had a scary experience today, almost losing my Bitcoins. It wasn't a huge amount maybe $80 worth of BTC, however that's still a fair amount of money, with fluctuating Bitcoin prices potentially someday that could be way more than $80, kinda like the recent news story about the guy who 2 years ago spend what today would be almost 3 Million US Dollars in Bitcoins, but at the time was only worth about $30.
Anyhow, this story will show you the importance of making sure you have exported your Bitcoin keys and keeping them backed up in more than one place.
You know I hear news stories about how some guy threw out a memory stick with 8 million Dollars worth of Bitcoins or someone's computer crashed and they lost such and such amount of Bitcoins. I always think how could someone be so stupid.
Today however I almost lost my Bitcoins, let me tell you how it happenned. I had my wallet key on the desktop of my computer and a memory stick. I wound up creating a new walleet however and sending all my coins to it. I saved it on my desktop but didn't back it up and transferred my coins there. I had intended to create a few backups but was in a rush and said I'll get around to it next time. Next day on my computer I wind up getting confused by all the old MultiBit keys on my desktop so I delete them all and say later I'll export to my desktop and a zip drive. Well I got lazy or busy and didn't do it.
So I login today and I get a message from MultiBit, there's a new version out. It winds up automatically updating for me, great right? Not so much, when the new version is downloaded I now see the left part of my screen which normally shows my wallets is blank. The new update had deleted my wallets. I was upset because I remembered I had deleted my keys and hadn't taken the time to re-create and resave my keys. Fortunately for me I hadn't emptied my recycling bin so I was able to restore the key and get my Bitcoins back but they could have been lost. This goes to show the importance of keeping copies and backing up your Bitcoin wallet keys.
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