Bitcoin Forum

I finally installed an updated Electrum after using 2.5.4 for the past year or so and my hot wallet, with all of my labels to transactions has been lost.  I restored it fine - but the process for losing it was truly scary and a mess.

When I attempted to load my old hot wallet I got a message saying something about unsupported multiple identity wallets? (which I had no idea my hot wallet was) and that it would now 'Save' it to a couple of wallets with the locations of the new files.  I said OK, assuming idiotically that I'd be able to find them in the default wallet location folder. 

I have no idea what happened.  I've looked for them in the AppData/Roaming/Electrum/wallets folder.  I run searches on today's modified *.dat files and now I'm just at a loss.  Where are they? 

I recovered the wallet through the seed, but I really need my labels for my taxes.

I'm an old progger.  And I feel that this was a mess.  I don't care what your program is supposed to do, but user data is sacrosanct.  It seems that 'default_wallet' gets over-written under certain circumstances? 

Sorry to rant, but I'd appreciate any help in finding my old wallets and where 2.7.18 put them. 

if your wallet was split, the new wallets do not have .dat extensions.
open the wallet folder from electrum 'File>Open' to view them

That folder now has only the un-labeled newly restored from seed wallets, as it goes to a folder that is a work folder I never set, but made backups to.

Just to add to the confusion, is it possible that a few failed seed-recovery attempts (while looking for the right hot wallet seed that I'd saved) might have caused the over-writes of the wallets?  

In other words, when I couldn't find the 'new' hot wallets I made a few attempts to restore from seed.  At no point, though was I given a 'file exists' warning.  

In the Windows Roaming directory with the wallets I've found I found a 'default_wallet.deterministic' and a 'default_wallet.imported.'  

That was probably that split wallet before one of my seed attempts over-wrote them?

no, Electrum will never overwrite an existing wallet file.

However, it is possible that version 2.5 used a different default directory than AppData/Roaming/Electrum/wallets
I am no Windows user, so I don't know what that path would be. maybe LocalAppData ?

yes these are the files you are looking for.
your seed attempts did not overwrite them.

That's strange, because those two wallets, default_wallet.deterministic and default_wallet.imported were both ancient, from 2013 and long-discarded.  Modified today, though... maybe the wallet splitting process took the wrong default_wallet to split? 

Btw... I just found a few more wallets, modified today, in this folder, which seems weird:

C:\Users\btcbot\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Electrum

VirtualStore?

Actually, I'm almost certain that that's what happened now.  (That it likely chose the default_wallet.dat file from the Roaming directory when it was, this morning, in the Program Files/Electrum directory.)

This morning, I ran my usual bash script:

cd /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Electrum/
./electrum & ./electrum -w seedless-orig.dat

Until I'd installed 2.7.18, this would load a default_wallet.dat hot wallet from the Program Files/Electrum directory and my cold storage wallet from that same directory.  

Both of those files disappeared this morning from that directory.  There are now no longer any wallet files in:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Electrum

So, Electrum actually deleted two wallet files of mine, this morning.  I saw them after the installation in the folder when I started searching.  One minute they were there, the next they were gone.  

EDIT: Just out of curiosity, I just did a search over my hard drive for 'seedless-orig.dat'.  That was one of the wallets tha I claimed was deleted.  It now seems like it was moved to a series, or what looks like 9 locations, similar to this:

C:\Users\btcbot\AppData\Local\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Electrum

I found 9 copies, modified from the last time I opened it.  I don't know if these are just Windows soft-links or what. 

A similar search over my hard drive for 'default_wallet.dat' produced nothing.