I am using a laptop dedicated to bitcoin, with bitcoin core installed, and switch between 3 active wallets. The switch is done using backups of all the files (including ‘wallet.dat’), held in ‘%AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin’ folder (these exclude ‘blocks’ & ‘chainstate’ folders). I also have ‘private keys’ backups. For security reasons the laptop wallet remains empty (no BTC value) as the default position & all backups are stored off-line & further encrypted. Rather than merge the wallets into one, I need to keep them separated out for reasons of logistics.
Firstly, please kindly advise if its possible to upgrade the client directly from currently installed v0.14.2 to the latest v0.17.0.1 (ignoring in between versions) using the default set of files representing an empty wallet? I suspect this is possible?
Following the client upgrade to v0.17.0.1, kindly advise if the backed-up files, when loaded for one of the active wallets will correctly re-instate the wallet?
If 2 above is problematic, then I assume importing the appropriate set of private keys will successfully re-instate the active wallet? This does seem to be confirmed as a solution from previous answers to similar questions.
I am a newbie to this site. Please be patient with me:)
Thank you
