It's generally sensible to back up your keys and recovery phrases.
The Parity recovery phrase is a 12-word mnemonic phrase allowing you to have an additional backup. It's displayed once after account creation and should be written down or printed out and kept in a safe place. This phrase is not protected with any password or encryption and should always kept offline and cold. In the rare case that your encrypted backups (see below) are corrupted or lost, the phrase allows you to fully recover your private key.
The most convenient way to backup your accounts is via the wallet UI which offers direct export of the encrypted key files in JSON format.
To backup a single account, just open your accounts view, click the account you wish to export, and find the EXPORT button.
Once you enter your passphrase and confirm, the key will be exported and downloaded to your disk.
The backup is a password-encrypted JSON-file.
To backup multiple accounts, or all accounts at once, just open your accounts view and find the EXPORT button.
Toggle which accounts you wish to export by clicking them, and thus enabling or disabling the account export.
Enter the password for each account you wish to export and confirm.
The backup is a set of password-encrypted JSON-files stored to your disk.
If the wallet UI is not available or not desired, keys can be backed up via JSON-RPC API or by manually copying and archiving the files.
The parity_exportAccount is exactly designed to retrieve the password-encrypted JSON backup via RPC.
curl --data '{"method":"parity_exportAccount","params":["0x007d73d8a49eeb85d32cf465507dd71d507100c1","hunter2"],"id":1,"jsonrpc":"2.0"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST localhost:8545The required parameters are the account to export and the password used to protect it.
Via CLI, this is simply a case of copying a particular directory. Here's how you can do it...
- on Mac:
cd $HOME/Library/Application\ Support/io.parity.ethereum/keys && tar czf $HOME/Desktop/parity-keys-backup.tgz *- on Linux:
cd $HOME/.local/share/io.parity.ethereum/keys && tar czf $HOME/Desktop/parity-keys-backup.tgz *- on Windows, the key folder can be found at
%HOMEPATH%/AppData/Roaming/Parity/Ethereum/keys.
You will get a file parity-keys-backup.tgz in your Desktop path (which should therefore show up on your desktop). You can move it wherever you want - a USB pen drive might be sensible.
To backup a simple contract wallet or multi-signature wallet, all you need to do is to remember the public address, and - of course - having backups of the associated owner accounts (see above for instructions).
To backup a complete vault, just backup the full directory containing the vault.json and all encrypted key files to a secure location. This directory is a sub-directory of your keys path, usually named after your vault.
Restoring options work analogue to the backup options explained above.
The user interface allows you to import keys from:
- Geth Keystore: This allows importing keys created in with the go-ethereum client.
- JSON Backup: This allows importing password-encrypted JSON key-files previously exported with Parity.
- Private Keys: This allows importing plain, unencrypted private keys generated with any other application.
- Presale Wallet: This allows importing a wallet from the initial Ether pre-sale maintained by the Ethereum Foundation.
In addition, it's possible to restore private keys from the 12-word mnemonic recovery phrase.
To restore from a previous CLI backup...
- on Mac:
cd $HOME/Library/Application Support/io.parity.ethereum/keys && tar xzf $HOME/Desktop/parity-keys-backup.tgz *- on Linux:
cd $HOME/.local/share/io.parity.ethereum/keys && tar xzf $HOME/Desktop/parity-keys-backup.tgz *This assumes our previously created backup is located on your Desktop.