Bitcoin Forum

I just felt I should post this so others can heed my warning, BACKUP your wallet.dat, frequently.

I just lost over 300$ worth of bitcoins because my computer froze and the wallet.dat is now 90% missing.  My backups wouldnt load either.  I've tried the private key recovery tools and they dont find anything.  Basically just please look after your wallet.dat. 

Please, heed the warning, This really screwed me big time, this week my wife lost her job, I was planning to cash these out to pay some bills. 

TL;DR; backup your fucking wallet.dat

How can a file be 90% missing?

Why make backups if your backups didn't save you

My guess is that it ran out of hdd space, but the file is only 30kb.  my backup is 120kb, but i suspect its out of date, i was only doing weekly backups.  it doesnt load anything on my 3 machines when i try to use it.

Good advice.

Also change your passwords after reading this sentence.  All of them.

How did your computer run out of space? Typical hard drives are hundreds of gigabytes.

If i had made a more recent backup, like yesterday i wouldve been fine.  I think my backup is not working because I sent some bitcoins to an exchange, then withdrew them again when the price went back down.

SSD.

Don't forget to print your wallet.dat next time.

Be easy on him though. He didn't make the thread entitled "My account got hacked, 20k BTC stolen".

He did the noble thing and blamed it on a full harddrive.


Two thumbs up!

moved onto mybitcoin now, I will probably just make a habbit of exchanging them for money sooner, cant really explain why it torched my wallet.dat like this.  Unfourtunate yes, all i wanted to do is get people to learn from my mistake.

point of reference, my backups of the pyramid game i ran are still fine and work if i load them up. I should probably have tested the backup of my primary wallet file.

eitherway I just needed to vent, I've had a shitty couple of days.

you know mybitcoin is a scam right?



and they steal coins?

srsly?

there are quite a few people making the same claim.  Guess its time to figure out a more robust backup system

Thanks for letting me know.

Welcome.

Congrats: You're probably less screwed than you think.

When you load it on another machine, do a rescan, then wait a while while the machine thrashes and rescans the block chains up to the current network position. When you load a wallet on a machine with a more recent blockchain, you usually need to trigger a rescan to make it find transactions.

"doesn't load anything" is unlikely even with a somewhat out of date backup, instead an out of date backup will usually show some of your balance but not all of it— and If you were not doing more than 100 getaddresses / sends per week then your backup should not be out of date.

If this doesn't fix you, then it still might be possible to recover your coins from the db log files in the bitcoin directory on the machine that broke. Make a backup of the whole bitcoin directory— block chain and all just in case.

Even if we're not able to help you get your coin back— we should still dig in a bit to the specifics of your loss— like why didn't your backups work, so that better advice can be given in the future.  After all, you were backing up, and for many users weekly is more than enough.

I'm sorry, but this thread doesn't ring true at all. 90% missing - computer froze - backups won't load - sad story about wife losing her job - no mention of -rescan.

I've got a 2+ month old copy of my wallet.dat, and I'd bet good BTC that I could recover my current balance with that copy.

Maybe he just doesn't know how to properly restore.  He didn't post a BTC address nor does he have a signature with one so I don't think he's trying to get any coins out of the community.

Delete everything except wallet.dat in Bitcoin's data directory (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory), put your wallet.dat backup in there, and start Bitcoin (0.3.24+). Wait an hour or two.

Consider the $300 a tuition payment in the School of Life.

Make scheduled local backups.
Make scheduled offsite backups.
Test backups.

On my Mac I use an external drive with Time Machine, which I've tested using a full restore, and I back up to Amazon S3 for $0.093 per GB using Arq as a front-end.

Hopefully, these sort of things can be solved the service is coming soon...

http://bitprotection.info

A good way to manage secure, automatic backups is through the established Spideroak (http://www.spideroak.com/) storage service.

They give you a good 2 GB for free, much like Dropbox, and they also offer free sync and automated backup services.

But what I like so much about Spideroak, is the fact that not even the employees have access to your stored files. Unlike Dropbox, which plainly states in their Terms of Service that all they hold rights to use any material you upload to their servers, Spideroak stores all your files in encrypted server-side containers. It is much like a remotely mounted Truecrypt container, and only you have the key to access it.

I probably sound like a salesman at this point, lol. But pretty much if you have 25 meg of ram to spare on the machine with your wallet, it's one of - if not the - best backup solutions out there. The only functional backup & sync service out there that I know to not skimp on the security at all. Not one Bit. (hurr, pun)


Did I also mention it has native Linux support with packages for multiple distros?

A backup service needs 25megs of ram at all times?

For the client to run.

Is it really that bad in these days of low-spec machines that come with four GB?