AND I have paper copies in another location, split up so you need both parts to complete the key.
There's an idea I haven't heard before. I might just try that. Even though I assume your private keys are BIP encrypted .... splitting them in half and putting them in two different locations is a pretty sick idea.
-B-
BittBurger, you mean you have never heard of Armory's fragmented backup solution?
Fragmented backup halfway downNope! But i'll check it out, thanks. I've intentionally stayed away from Armory because it is not friendly to the less technically-inclined like myself. I am sure its a robust and exhaustively secure system, but being robust and exhausting (for someone like me) is why I didn't bother. I couldn't see any reason why a simple bitaddress.org Bip38 paper wallet printed offline and stored in a bank safety deposit box, is any less secure than Armory.
In fact, leaving anything reliant upon *any* software seems like a bad idea to me in general.
I was backing up my wallet.dat files for awhile there, and then one day bitcoin core wouldn't let me import my largest wallet file, which I had put on a USB drive. I almost lost everything I had. Fortunately I'd deleted a wallet.dat copy in the past, and it was still sitting in my recycle bin. That one worked. Any wallet.dat file that I had pulled off my hard drive and put back onto it wouldn't work anymore. Scariest day of my Bitcoin life. That's when I said "f*ck anything electronic, this is going on paper".
There is no way im going to trust my life savings to a windows application.
-B-