Backup & Restore wallet

Using wallet.dat to completely backup and restore your wallet

Your funds are backed up by Recovery Phrase (~ mnemonic seed) during wallet creation and that is enough to keep your coins safe. However if you want to backup all the additional data like addresses saved in Address Book and more, you’ll need to backup your wallet.dat file.

Always backup your wallet.dat to a secure place (USB, external drive etc.) – if anyone would get access to it and knew your wallet password, they could steal your coins! That is the main reason to encrypt your wallet right after you created one.

Keep in mind that this backup approach only saves data created up to that point. All data created after backup was made won’t be included in the backup. You should backup your wallet.dat file periodically.

With Particl Core, you can easily backup your wallet.dat file via File → Backup wallet…

1. close your wallet (if running)
2. manually locate your wallet.dat file on disk (see below)
3. copy the file to a safe and secure place manually (do not move – copy!)

When making backups, it’s sane to name the backup files properly, e.g. including wallet name/type and date, like part-wallet-personal_2019-06-03.dat. This will help you greatly later, when you’ll have many backup files.

Look in these folders (depending on your OS):

OS	Path to directory
Windows	%AppData%\Particl
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/Particl
Linux	~/.particl

You should look for either a file called wallet.dat or a folder called wallet (or something else, if you chose a custom wallet name when creating it), in which you should find the wallet.dat file.

Restoring from your wallet.dat file is the same as doing manual backups, only in reverse:

1. close your wallet (if running)
2. copy your backed up wallet.dat file to a correct folder depending on your OS
3. rename the file to its original name (e.g. if you renamed wallet.dat to personal-wallet_2019-06-03.dat, rename it back to wallet.dat, otherwise it won’t be recognized)
4. launch your wallet again and unlock it with your wallet password