Sorry, its version 11.8 which I upgraded to the latest now.
But the latest version is
0.16.2. Where did you download core from ?
What do you mean by "buggy" tools to extract the keys from the wallet.dat? Are they not safe to use?
Well, if you do make a backup of your wallet.dat, you can't destroy anything.
But pywallet hasn't been maintained for a few years now. This means that it might fail dumping all necessary private keys.
While it is not unsafe, it does not guarantee to retrieve all of your private keys.
"extracting the private key" - do you mean that I have to put the wallet.dat backup from this computer to another and exchange the wallet.dat file with the one in the bitcoin folder?
The easiest probably would be if you move your wallet.dat to another computer with core installed (into the data directory, usually located in
C:\Users\USER\Appdata\Roaming\Bitcoin).
Then you will be able to dump the private keys using these commands:
walletpassphrase "YOUR_PASSWORD" 600
(to unlock your wallet for 600 seconds)
dumpprivkey "YOUR_ADDRESS"
(to dump the private key)
Note: Do not delete ANY wallet.dat files. Only rename them. This way you can't mess up and accidentally delete the wrong file.