hello, i was experimenting with moving a little btc money around from one address to another. After doing this i deleted one of the wallet.dat files. Ten minutes later, i moved all my bitcoins to one of my addresses. The trouble is, the wallet with that address was the one i deleted. And i deleted it with linux shred, so it really is gone. Are my btc lost?
Very likely. Sorry to hear that, hope you didn't burn too many Bitoins. But it's kind of like having paper-cash, moving it around different wallets and then throwing one of those wallets into fire.
The difference is that physical wallets are really hard to back up (I'm not aware of any technology that successfully does this). Digital wallets are really easy to back up. One just has to think of it.
That said ... it will be great once the Bitcoin client has some mechanisms for backups / encryption built in.