Help with Bitcoin terminal instructions

OK so I am trying to make all my work space secure especially bitcoin wallet. However I am reading this instructions:
Backup all data
Follow these instructions to backup all the bitcoin data (wallet and block chains) to an encrypted disk image.

Open Disk Utility

Click New Image and choose a big enough size, 128-bit or 256-bit (faster or more secure) encryption and single partition.

Save it somewhere you won't lose it (like your Wuala, Dropbox, Strongspace or whatever)

Choose a safe and strong password

Move everything from ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/ to the image

Symlink it back so the app would be able to use it

ln -s /Volumes/Bitcoin ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin

Don't forget to mount your image before using Bitcoin and unmount it after quitting.

But I get lost on the last 3 steps can anyone please explain them to a computer idiot. Thanks

What did you name your disk image? It's assuming you named it Bitcoin. So you make a softlink/symlink to it (while it's still mounted) using the ln command.
If you named it something else, use the name in the command, eg: ln -s /Volumes/NAME
To break it dowm...
ln -s (make a link, in this case a soft link)
/Volumes/Bitcoin (what the link is pointing to, the disk image which when mounted is in /Volumes)
~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin (where the link is - which is wrong because a path with a space needs to be escaped in the shell so it would be:
~/Library/Application\ Support/Bitcoin Notice the extra \ )

Also don't forget to mount the disk image before using your bitcoin software.

cradom said:

What did you name your disk image? It's assuming you named it Bitcoin. So you make a softlink/symlink to it (while it's still mounted) using the ln command.
If you named it something else, use the name in the command, eg: ln -s /Volumes/NAME
To break it dowm...
ln -s (make a link, in this case a soft link)
/Volumes/Bitcoin (what the link is pointing to, the disk image which when mounted is in /Volumes)
~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin (where the link is - which is wrong because a path with a space needs to be escaped in the shell so it would be:
~/Library/Application\ Support/Bitcoin Notice the extra \ )

Also don't forget to mount the disk image before using your bitcoin software.

Click to expand...

Thank you for answering. I named it 'secure workspace' But I dont understand the rest I am sorry I dont want to risk playing around until I understand how to do it. Is there anyway you can make it a bit more simple?

What you're doing is making a link so the program thinks it's looking at ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin but it's actually looking at /Volumes/Bitcoin. Kinda like using an alias.
In your case the command would be: ln -s /Volumes/'secure workspace' ~/Library/Application\ Support/Bitcoin
Notice I 'escaped' the filename because it contained a space. Do yourself a favor, don't use spaces in filenames. Makes things easier when typing paths in Terminal.
Also, make sure you've copied whatever is in ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin to your disk image before doing this. In case you didn't know, ~ means your Home folder. So copy the Bitcoin folder which is in ~/Library/Application Support to the disk image.