Backup restore

[ghost]

We've received a number of complaints about not having this feature exposed in the GUI; should probably get it in there...

[mackuba]

Probably something like this: on the initial page of the wizard, where you have a "Create a new wallet" button, there would be a second button underneath saying "Restore a wallet from a backup".

[ghost]

Re: #106 ... Not sure if a lot of attention should be put on this, but of course we need a clear upgrade path described/worked out somewhere (including a way to import "old" wallet backups). CC @javgh since we need to figure this out in a common way.

[lra]

Well it's certainly a blocker for all those users like me who have multiple computers. I don't want to have a wallet per system, right?

[mackuba]

Well it's certainly a blocker for all those users like me who have multiple computers. I don't want to have a wallet per system, right?

It's kind of designed to work this way... You can copy a wallet to another computer manually right now, but they won't be completely synced. Transactions you make on one computer will of course appear on the other, but any metadata stored with them would be lost (payment request details, currency rate info, possibly some manually added notes in the future, and so on), contact lists also wouldn't be synced. That's why it's not something we officially recommend. Syncing everything in the wallet would require a completely new syncing system and much more work.

[lra]

But the wallet is already in dropbox anyway, why not leverage this?
I know there are security issues with this, but I'm not puttin $1000 in hive =)

The problem right now is that I want use hive for day to day shopping, and this is a friction to this use.

[mackuba]

But the wallet is already in dropbox anyway, why not leverage this?

It's one thing to copy a backup into the Dropbox folder and forget about it, and completely different thing to actually synchronize the data in memory with the Dropbox version in real time, and integrate this with Core Data (Apple's framework for handling databases) which doesn't expect that the files in which it's storing data might be overwritten by another application at random times. It would be a lot of work to make this work, and it's hard to even estimate how much.

The problem right now is that I want use hive for day to day shopping, and this is a friction to this use.

It will get much easier to use the same wallet on the desktop and on the mobile once I add BIP32 support (which might happen before the end of the year).