Wallet backup strategy

Question

Hi.

At the moment a worker process is running on a multichain server and does a periodic backup of the wallet file.

My first idea was to check if the hashsum of the wallet.dat changed and if so to backup the file.

But the problem is the hashsum of the wallet.dat nearly always changes, even if there are no real transactions and of course no transactions that create new addresses.

Why is the wallet.dat modified all the time?

 

Greetings,

Alex

Answer 1

Good question! The last block number is cached inside wallet.dat, which is the reason it is constantly changing. This block number is actually not used with the new wallet (walletdbversion=2) which is set by default, so we will change this behavior in the next maintenance release. In the meantime, assuming you are using walletdbversion=2, you don't have to keep backing up these changes – only when new addresses are added.

Answer 2

Version 1.0.4 of MultiChain, just released, fixes this issue by not updating wallet.dat when unnecessary.

Comments

Again, thanks for the information. :-)