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My Macbook is having some issues and I have a desktop wallet on it for Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ripple.

I have been told to completely redo my laptop with a factory reset. How can I move or save these coins while I restore my Macbook?

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  • As a temporary solution, you could use an exchange such as poloniex.com or bittrex.com, depending on how much you're holding you should be able to transfer your altcoins to there fairly easily.
    – Rutger Versteegden
    Nov 21, 2017 at 16:43
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    Soooo your funds are entireley dependent on the well-being of your PC? You are doing something very very wrong.
    – Caterpillaraoz
    Nov 22, 2017 at 9:45

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Rutger's response is probably the easiest. Other options would require an understanding of the wallet(s) used. They might have private keys that can be used to allow immediate setup after reinstalling. For example, the Ripple (Rippex) desktop wallet has a secret key that can be used.

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Good solution is to save your wallet datas

Depend on what type of wallet your using, if it electrum then you can save and write down the seeds

If it the core (developer) version then you can go into the folder by default, it should be in this location ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/ and just move the wallet.dat to your flash drive or cloud drive

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  • Keep in mind that you'll have to repeat this for every separate wallet you are using (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ripple, etc) and they might have different procedures. Also, anyone who gets access to these files can steal all your coins, so you might want to think twice about cloud storage (the cloud service's system administrators could steal the coins if they wanted).
    – Nate Eldredge
    Jan 21, 2018 at 18:16
  • Depend on what type of cloud drive, u can use it temporary (only if u need to format now and don't have the flash drive with you) and then delete it from there or you can make another wallet.dat and move the funds from this wallet.dat to the new wallet.dat after you have formatted your computer and have access to the old wallet.dat
    – zhiyan114
    Jan 21, 2018 at 18:18
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this is basically not a bitcoin related question... it is "common best approach for dealing with values". You need to make backups. On a Mac it is sooooooo easy! Just by a 50€ - 100€ external USB Harddisk, and start time machine. Yes, really. It will take 3-5hours, depending on data size and speed of external HDD (timing based on my USB2 external HDD and ~400Gig of data). I have done this several times, and also restored whole Mac OSX (it even had the documents opened, when the last backup was running). I cannot state, how important it is to have backups: your best solution is time machine.

Once you have setup your MAC with new/proper OSX, you can restore parts of the time machine backup, especially the user directory, were all data of wallets is usually stored.

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To give you a proper answer:

Please elaborate on the type of “factory reset” you’ll be completing. Several ways to complete and all have different consequences to the data retention/deletion on the Mac pre/Post reset.

What steps will you be taking to complete your “factory reset”??

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  • A factory reset would be considered to be a deletion of all data, reformatting of the HDD and re-installation of MacOS (or OSX). As such I would recommend doing a backup with time machine first, and then do factory reset. All data can then be retrieved from Tim’s machine backup.
    – pebwindkraft
    Jan 28, 2018 at 16:31
  • Incorrect. A “Factory Reset” in its traditional sense, simply reinstalling an OS. No data is formatted or scrubbed or wiped (unless you’ve specified so which is not standard). All the old data still exists even after formatting or wiping a drive.
    – BeepBopBoom
    Jan 29, 2018 at 18:01
  • why do you say incorrect? When I had a dual partitioned Mac, with Linux and/or Windows (boot camp), then I'd need to reformat the disk. I don't want to overdo it , but interpreting "factory reset in its traditional sense" is beyond my scope then...
    – pebwindkraft
    Jan 29, 2018 at 18:52
  • I said incorrect because reformatting a hard drive and reinstalling a OS does not delete the data from the hard drive. It simply removes the pointers to the data which remains written to storage. The closest you can come to data deletion is wiping the storage drive, or overwriting the storage drive.
    – BeepBopBoom
    Feb 11, 2018 at 23:55

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