Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Bitcoin Technical Support => Topic started by: bitbites on August 28, 2011, 07:33:40 PM



Title: Restoring backed up wallet.dat
Post by: bitbites on August 28, 2011, 07:33:40 PM
I'm using Windows 7 64 bit and I'm trying to resore a wallet using a backed up wallet.dat but it doesn't seem to be working, can anyone help?

Here's what I did

I installed a fresh copy of the Bitcoin app from www.bitcoin.org, ran it once, then closed it down
I deleted everything in the AppData/Roaming/Bitcoin folder
I copied wallet.dat to AppData/Roaming/Bitcoin folder
I started up Bitcoin again

It shows all my past transactions, but they all show "0/unconfirmed" and it shows my wallet balance as 0.00

What am I doing wrong? How can I recover my bitcoins from the backup?


Title: Re: Restoring backed up wallet.dat
Post by: Meni Rosenfeld on August 28, 2011, 07:40:49 PM
In the status bar of the Bitcoin application, you can see the number of blocks you have. It should be at least 142949, otherwise you need to wait until the block chain is downloaded.

If this doesn't help, run Bitcoin with the -rescan command line switch.


Title: Re: Restoring backed up wallet.dat
Post by: bitbites on August 28, 2011, 07:45:40 PM
Okay, thanks. I'm using the rescan command. It's on 66000 blocks at the moment, so I guess I have to wait a bit. Does this process use up a lot of bandwidth do you know? I'm on a limited ADSL package.


Title: Re: Restoring backed up wallet.dat
Post by: Meni Rosenfeld on August 28, 2011, 08:25:42 PM
In this case there's no need for rescan.

I think it's not too bandwidth intensive because you're limited by the number of connections. If you can forward port 8332 it should allow more connections.


Title: Re: Restoring backed up wallet.dat
Post by: Pieter Wuille on August 29, 2011, 04:00:51 PM
You're not rescanning - you're just redownloading the block chain. It will take a while, but don't worry.

Next time, leave blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat in place - since 0.3.21 that should work fine.