Bitcoin Forum

Hello

I recently deleted a wallet by accident but I still have the 12-word password.

I'm wondering two things:
Do the 12-word passphrases work for any wallet or just the one that it came from?
How do they work?  I tried searching for it and I couldn't find my coins!

Thanks!!

That password is just for the deleted wallet. Any new wallet that you create will not contain your deleted addresses, so re-using that same password will not bring back your Bitcoins. Assuming that you didn't perform a Gutmann wipe on your wallet.dat file, then I highly suggest using a file recovery software to recover it.

Depending on how many coins were in the wallet you should do the following (assuming it was worth more than $100).

Shut off the machine in use.
Pull out the drive (or have somebody else who knows how remove it and do the following).
Hook it up to another PC
check the appdata/roaming/bitcoin directory to see if a wallet.dat exists and back it up (guessing this is the new wallet if you had reinstalled)
Use a file recovery program to see if you can un-erase the file wallet.dat

If you have a backup of the wallet.dat file on a USB drive you could recover it that way but it doesn't sound like you had one :(

Fuck.  There was ~2.5 btc on it.  Is there any easy way of doing a recovery instead of pulling out hard drives?  I'll gift anyone $100 btc if they can help me.

Well, if the machine is in use right now - STOP all drive access as much as possible so the old wallet doesn't get written over.  use another machine until you try to recover it.

There are a few trustworthy people who might be able to walk you through this remotely or maybe somebody local.  Post in the services section asking for help and offer 0.15BTC bounty.

Done and thank you for your advice!

There's no need to pull out your hard drive. A well-known software like Recuva from a trusted company like Piriform can easily recover your soft-deleted files within 5 minutes. Do your due diligence on the software if you feel the need to, but I've personally never found any reason to distrust it. You need to minimize the usage of your computer before you are able to recover your file though, since extremely bad luck can still allow a stray file to overwrite a deleted file no matter how large your hard drive is.

Ty for the heads up.  I have spent the better part of the last 15 months trying to learn everything about bitcoin yet I still obviously know next to nothing.  Appreciate the help.

Is this an Electrum wallet?

Negative.

Is there a Recuva equivalent for macintosh?

I have never needed to look for a Mac alternative myself since I always save my files on USB drives if I have to work on a Mac. Try this list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_recovery_software#File_recovery). As always, please do your due diligence on any software that you intend to use. Better safe than sorry, as the saying goes.

So that 12 words is really your password rather than the wallet seed. :(

OP, Sorry to hear your loss. You could prevent the loss if you have made backups for your wallet file.

Having backups of the wallet.dat file is good, but having the keys on some paper or spread across 2 papers and keeping multiple copies would be even better. It's not worth it for $50, but for 2.5BTC it's worth the effort.

What bitcoin client were you using?

Check if this helps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-pjErWoSFQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

sad but true, im confirming this
file recovery software will give you high chance of wallet recovery, just dont do much writes to disk since deletion

Nobody asked you if you have private keys stored somewhere, so i will ask you?

You are getting a lot of potentially bad advice from a lot of people who haven't taken the time to understand your situation first.

It is possible that recovering deleted data from the hard drive might be necessary, but until some basic questions are answered first, it is impossible to know.

While it doesn't hurt to turn that computer off until we figure out exactly what the situation is, the first and most important question that needs to be answered was asked by BitBlue and is still unanswered:


If you were using blockchain.info, Electrum, or Armory, then you are probably being sent down the wrong path to recover this.

If you were using Bitcoin Core or MultiBit, then your options for recovery become more limited.

If you are using some other wallet entirely, then it is difficult to know what your situation is until you let us know what wallet it was.

As noted above by Danny we would need to know which Bitcoin client is used since that directs which method of recovery.  If we assume it was the BitcoinQT client on PC as most users use, then DrG's recovery method would be a good start.  Although it sounds like he's using a Mac.