Bitcoin Forum

So i mined bitcoins in the older days.
But by my own stupidity i somehow lost all my backups of wallet.dat.
Any scenarios i might be able to get them back somehow?

Here's the stuff i do have:
* Previous addresses found on blockchain(wont share atm cause i want to retrieve it first)

* 12 word passphrase(i tried using electrum on my phone to retrieve my wallet but somehow its another walletaddress? Does this depend on what wallet the 12 passphrase code was used or? I doubt it but it might also be from another address where no bitcoins where on but i really doubt that, also the 12 word passphrase was made on a mac not my android phone)

* 370 dat files i retrieved from my formatted mac with all random character names( So i used photorec and searched for every dat on my mac but names are different so i have no clue if my wallet is in there and how to find it, looked for wallet file to with photorec but did not find anything although the files was wallet.dat and not ***.wallet.

I hzve no clue what software i used on my pc or mac and what version its to long ago.
I think i used bitcoin core on pc and a software which allows 12 passphrase on mac at the same time, i never checked my pc since then, suddenly it was another address i think(on oc).

Thats about all the info i have atm, im willing to send a percentage of my findings if someone can point me in a direction to retrieve my btc.

Thanks in advance.

If you have the correct seed phrase, you'll probably be able to recover using the desktop version of Electrum.  You may need to tell Electrum the number of words in the phrase AND the derivation path.  If you have a guess which wallet you got the seed phrase from, then I could tell you the proper derivation path.  Otherwise, you could just try all the common ones.

Electrum has a variety of settings you can manipulate to adjust for importing seeds from other wallets (such as MultiBit or blockchain.info).

Depending on how long ago you are talking about, your seed most likely came from one of the following:

• MultiBit
• Armory
• Blockchain.info

The wallet file for MultiBit was typically named:
{something}.wallet

The wallet file for Bitcoin Core (called Bitcoin-Qt long ago) and Armory was typically named:
wallet.dat

Blockchain.info stored the wallet file in the cloud on their servers, but would email you the wallet data if you requested it.  In that case the name would depend on the name you chose when you saved it from your email.

As long as you have the right 12 word seed everything is fine.
Did you already try to use different derivation paths?
Standard is, i think, m/44'/1'/0'/0. But different wallets are using different paths.
I guess there aren't too much mac wallets. Checking the most common paths  could do the trick for you

Just a note, Electrum on mobile devices does not allow for recovering non-Electrum 12 word passphrases.

If this passphrase was NOT from Electrum, you'll need to use a desktop version of Electrum (available for Windows, Linux and Mac here: https://electrum.org/#download)

When you create the new wallet, select "standard wallet -> I already have a seed", then make sure you click the "Options" button and select "BIP39 seed".

After you enter the seed and click next, you'll be prompted for the "Derivation Path". I would suggest trying the following common ones to see if you can recreate the wallet:
m/44'/0'/0' - default, used by a lot of Hardware wallets
m/0' - used by MultiBit HD
m/0'/0'
m/0


If none of those work, you can also try using an offline copy of Ian Coleman's BIP39 tool (https://iancoleman.io/bip39/) and see if you can find the right derivation path by experimenting (click the BIP32 tab and select "custom derivation path" from the drop down), buy the chances of it being anything else are relatively slim :-\