Backing up your wallet

What you must keep safe depends on how you set the wallet up. This page says what each file is, what a lost file costs you, and how to copy what matters. Using your wallet explains the three ways to set one up.

⚠️ Warning: your backups are how you reach your coins.

Janus 2.0.0 shows a wallet. It does not send. The private keys of a wallet you imported stay in the wallet.dat or the dump you imported it from, or sealed in the file Janus made from it. Lose those and no program can bring the keys back.

What to keep

What	Where	What it gives you
The 12-word recovery phrase	On paper, written by you	The addresses of a wallet made with Janus.
`wallets/evm-<address>.json`	In `.janus`, made by Janus	The sealed phrase, and for an imported dump its sealed keys.
Your original `wallet.dat`	Where the older wallet kept it	The private keys of a wallet.dat you imported.
`backups/wallet-<date>.dat`	In `.janus`, made by Janus	A copy of that `wallet.dat`, made when you imported it.
The wallet dump	Wherever you wrote it	The private keys of a dump you imported, in the clear.

.janus is a folder in your home folder. How to reset your wallet shows where it is on each system.

The recovery phrase

Write the 12 words on paper, in order, and keep the paper somewhere safe, ideally two places. Do not keep it in a photo, an e-mail or a note in the cloud: anyone who gets the words controls the addresses they give.

The phrase is not a password. It is the wallet itself. The password you chose only seals it on your computer. If you forget the password, restore the wallet from its phrase and choose a new one. The file is replaced, as Getting back to a wallet describes.

The wallet files

Copy the whole .janus folder to a place you trust, such as a USB stick that you keep locked away. Step 2 of the reset guides shows the command for your system:

Keep the copy private. It holds your wallets with only their own protection: the password of a wallet made with Janus, and whatever protection a wallet.dat had in the older wallet.

Copy again whenever you create, restore or import a wallet.

A wallet from a wallet.dat

When you import a wallet.dat, Janus copies it into .janus/backups and reads only its addresses. It never asks for the wallet’s passphrase and does not change your original.

Keep the original wallet.dat, or the copy in backups, with the same care as before. They hold the private keys, and Janus does not.

A wallet from a dump

When you import a wallet dump, Janus does not copy it. It seals the private keys of the dump under a new recovery phrase and your password, in wallets/evm-<address>.json, and shows: “Keep the dump until your wallet is saved, then delete it.”

Before you delete the dump:

Copy the file wallets/evm-<address>.json, or the whole .janus folder, to your backup place. That file is now the only place the keys are kept, and the recovery phrase alone cannot bring them back without it.
Write down the new recovery phrase.

Then delete the dump with care. It holds your keys unprotected, and a file deleted in a terminal, or from the Trash after it is emptied, is gone for good. The phrase opens the keys in the file, and so does your password, which means that a forgotten password does not lose them.

What you need not copy

hedgehog and hedgehog.log in .janus are the Hedgehog program and its log. Hedgehog also keeps the legacy ledger, a download of about 314 MB, in a folder of its own. All of it is downloaded again when needed, and none of it holds a wallet.

Using a backup

On a new computer, or after a reset, start Janus and choose Import existing wallet. Then:

From a recovery phrase: choose Restore from recovery phrase and enter the 12 words.
From a wallet.dat: choose Choose a wallet.dat or wallet dump and pick the original or a copy in backups.
From a dump you imported earlier: first put the file evm-<address>.json into the folder .janus/wallets, creating it if it is not there. Then restore from the recovery phrase. The phrase finds the file by its first address, and the keys in it stay with the wallet.