Quote from: bitmarket.io on March 30, 2015, 12:52:06 PM

Quote from: Soros Shorts on March 30, 2015, 11:30:38 AM

Quote from: bitmarket.io on March 30, 2015, 05:25:26 AM

What do you mean you need to make frequent backups of your wallet.dat? Wont one suffice?

Well, using the standard client, when you make a new receiving address or when the wallet makes a new automatic change address you'd want to save that. I think the standard wallet keeps a pool of 100 reserve addresses by default (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Key_pool) that gets saved as part of the backup, so you only need to do backups when you are about to use up the pool. In the past, many people lost BTC when they restored a wallet from an old backup that did not contain newer receiving addresses that were created after the backup was made.

Of course if you don't use your wallet or your only use is for coins to keep coming in to the same address(es) then you don't need to keep making backups.

Good info.

Also I have a laptop and desktop. Is it possible to have Bitcoin-qt synced between the two machines so I can send and receive BTC from both machines using the same wallet and BTC funds? Does this question make sense?

bitcoin-qt generates random keys so your two wallet copies will diverge at some point. You should use a deterministic wallet like electrum if you want a wallet that remains consistent on multiple devices.

Encrypting a wallet with gpg does have advantages because an attacker would need the gpg private key to decrypt it. As long as you don't make the mistake of also uploading the gpg private key to your cloud backups you benefit from an additional layer of security.