How to backup and restore your Peercoin Wallet

Backing up your wallet is an important step to securing your coins in the event of losing your current minting wallet. Having a backup will enable you to restore your wallet for minting.

First let’s take a copy of the wallet.dat file:

1. In the menu navigate to File > Backup wallet

2. Save the backup wallet to a location on the StakeBox file system, by default the location is Documents. 

Transferring your backup wallet to your computer

There are a number of ways in which you can connect to your computer from your StakeBox to transfer files, including your backup wallet. You can choose one of the below methods which is more suitable to you. If you do not have remote access to your StakeBox then we highly recommend you read the article "How to remotely access your Peercoin StakeBox" first.

USB

Note: It is highly recommended that you also protect your Flash drive by encrypting it with a password in the event that you may lose it.

1. Insert your USB flash drive into a spare USB 2.0 socket on your StakeBox. The Flash drive will automatically be detected as a drive and its directory will become available.

2. On the Desktop click on the file icon on the top tool bar
3. Navigate to where you saved your wallet backup file and right click to copy or go to File > Copy
4. Navigate to the USB flash drive in Media > Pi > NAME OF FLASH DRIVE

5. In the menu select File > Paste to make a copy of the backup wallet

VNC Viewer

If you are using VNC viewer there is a built-in File Transfer option where you can ONLY send files from either the server or the client. In this case we will want to send files from the Server since that is where the StakeBox is running.

1. Open VNC viewer on your computer and connect to the StakeBox. On the desktop you should see the VNC server icon in the top right tool bar. Click on this icon to open up the VNC server.

2. In the VNC server application click on the menu in the top right hand corner to bring a drop box down. You should see the option File Transfer.

3. Click on File Transfer and you should see the File Transfer Here you can click on Send Files and select the wallet backup file we created earlier.

If you go back to the VNC viewer on your computer you should see a message stating that a file transfer has successfully been completed.

SFTP File Transfer

The SSH File transfer protocol is the easiest method to transfer files between two devices on your StakeBox since we already have SSH enabled.

1. On your computer you will need to download an FTP client such as FileZilla from filezilla-project.org

2. Launch FileZilla and go to File > Site manager

3. Create a New Site and name it StakeBox or whatever you like.
4. Under General tab fill in the IP address of your StakeBox and in the Protocol box select SFTP. Under Logon Type select normal and then fill in your user name and password for the StakeBox in the below fields.

5. Click connect
6. If prompted click ok to trust the host connection

7. You are now connected to the StakeBox using SFTP 

Here we can see our folder on the right hand side where we saved our wallet backup file earlier.

8. On the left hand side navigate to a folder where you would like to save your backup wallet to. For example, you might want to save it to a new folder named Peercoin Wallet in the Documents folder. Simply navigate to Documents and right click to create a new directory.
9. Now locate your wallet backup file on the right hand side and right click the file and select Download

You should now see the back-up wallet has now transferred to your computer. Make sure that you save this wallet in a secure location to prevent any unauthorized access. 

Restoring your wallet

In the event that you lose your wallet or it get corrupted you can restore it with your backup copy, simply by copying and pasting to the same location that the wallet.dat file is. Remember that you will need to rename your backup wallet file to wallet.dat in order for the Peercoin application to read your wallet.

You can transfer your backup wallet file using all the of methods above from your computer.