Bitcoin Forum

So I believe I made a terrible mistake. After I used the walletgenerator to generate a paper wallet, I printed it to a pdf  file and saved it. I used the public address to mine and to receive my coins. Today when i opened the pdf file and turned out the printing is not full. That is, part of the private key is missing...

Does this mean I can never use the coins in the public address? Is there any way to recover? TIA!!!

No private key = no access to the funds.  That's it.  Nothing you can do.  Nada.

Forget it and move on.  Take it as a lesson on the importance of keeping the private key safe.

Too bad for you.

Did you check the pdf file if the details are complete there? If not, without a private key your wallet is considered lost.

Accept the reality, next time you better check your records and test your private keys before you use the public address

This is a long shot, but depending on how much of the private key is there, you might still have a shot at recovering it.

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/lets-enhance-how-we-found-rogerkver-s-1000-wallet-obfuscated-private-key-8514e74a5433 (https://medium.freecodecamp.org/lets-enhance-how-we-found-rogerkver-s-1000-wallet-obfuscated-private-key-8514e74a5433)

I don't know if you have the QR code or just the private key string, but in the above article they were able to recover an obfuscated private key from a video interview with some math and python.  It's not likely, but might be worth taking a look at.

Are you sure that pdf file is missing? Like you 'printed' landscape instead portrait? or some scale error?
How many characters are missing? You can bruteforce but need to do some math, maybe it not worth.

Thanks for all your reply. The default printer setting cut off the most private key part and only a few characters left. I guess I had to give up them. Well, good lesson learned.

^ So you mean you dont have the pdf file? did you check it on your recycle bin? Or did you try data recovery tools? or system restore from windows?

If you can recover your PDF file you still have a chance. just give it a try.

I have pdf file. The problem is, the file is not complete as seen in the web page when I created the keys. Part of it is not printing.

I wonder if there is any way you could retrieve a cached version on the web page or something like that.

Don't you have the QR code, or at least part of it?

In the future.

Try and sign a message with your BTC address and see if it works as confirmation that your private key will unlock your funds.

You can do this offline with Bitcoin core.

Always verify the private key is safe outside your PC before proceeding. Take a photo of your screen, paste it in a word doc and zip it with a password and email it to an address you don't use for exchanges or whatever.  I've learned some hard lessons too.

Low chance to get a result but you could try to edit the PDF with editing software like "adobe acrobat pro".
Supposing the text has not been shortened, if the missing text part is out of the boundaries of the page, it could still be there but not displayed(rendered) by the pdf engine.