Bitcoin Forum

I am currently using a LENOVO Core i.5 Laptop. Let's say I have Electrum installed on my laptop and I unknowingly reinstall my laptop and forget to move my Electrum to a storage area that will not be deleted during the reinstallation process.
Will the assets in my Electrum wallet be deleted too?
If they are lost due to deletion during reinstallation, is there a solution to this if someone forgets to secure them?

It would be deleted, all files would be deleted.

The best advice is if you have your 12 words seed phrase which Electrum will always generate you when generate a wallet on it, back up the seed phrase in two or three locations and your coins are secure with yourself.

You have your seed phrase simply means you have your coins.

It could be but here is my question --do you have a 12 words phrase as your private key?
If you have this, you can simply restore your Electrum wallet without a problem, there should be an option ^{[New/Restore]} and select Restore to recover your wallet. You can also find it in your computer the wallet.file it could be there because only the app you uninstalled but the file was not.

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Make sure you have downloaded it from the official website of Electrum. ^{[ https://electrum.org/#download ]}
Always remember it --always have a backup with your seed.

This is correct because if you have your seed phrase, it can always generate your private key for you as long as you have access to it, but you are not correct by implying that seed phrase is private key.

Like I meant earlier, all files will be gone.

As mentioned above, you can easily recover your wallet using your seed phrase.
If you want to re-install your OS and you haven't already backed up your seed phrase, click on "Wallet" at top of the window and select "Seed".


Take note that your bitcoin is on the blockchain, not in the electrum. No one can remove your bitcoin from the blockchain.

What do you mean?
Let's say I buy Bitcoin on a binance exchange and send it to an Electrum wallet to store it.
Can you explain so we can understand that we need to keep Bitcoin on the blockchain and not on Electrum.

Bitcoin are stored on blockchain, an open ledger available to the public where you can see bitcoin transaction. That your seed phrase can generate the keys and addresses needed for your wallet or  coin recovery. If you import the seed phrase on Electrum, it will (connect with a central server and) synchronize with the blockchain and you will be able to access your coin.

Good to take note that Binance is centralized, it is not your coin on blockchain if you have coins on Binance, Binance have the private keys to the coins, they only give your addresses.

They are talking about the Bitcoin "blockchain", and not "Blockchain online wallet" of blockchain(dot)com.
That's the huge set of files that most Bitcoin node have in their drive, it consist of "chain of blocks" where the transactions are recorded.

Electrum and any other Bitcoin wallets don't contain bitcoins, they only manage the coins accessible by the "private keys" stored in them.
And as an answer to your question, all of your wallet's "private keys" can be derived from your seed phrase so be sure to keep it safe.

Assets always remain on the blockchain, it is simply impossible to "delete" them. When you make a transaction, what you actualy do is transfering ownership over these assets. The ownership is established through special keys called "private keys". For example, Binance has private keys to some coins stored on the blockchain. Given that they own these coins, they can make transactions with these coins and move them around between their wallets. Once they move these coins to a wallet to which they have no private keys (your wallet for instance), they essentially stop controlling these coins. Private keys is what that really matters. You can import them in almost any wallet you want and they will work. If you lose your private keys, your coins remain on the blockchain but you will lose the ability to move them because you stop owning them. Because, as mentioned above, the "ownership is established through special keys called "private keys".

And the answer is that it will be erased along with the reinstallation process.

This is no answer because forgetting is half of dying and it's the biggest "disease" that exists in us humans.
As far as I know, be it Electrum or any other wallet if we forget to save the seed phrase, the assets contained therein cannot be restored to a new device (laptop or computer).
But I think whoever we are before reinstalling a laptop or computer, the most important things on it will be known and efforts will be made to secure them first.

By the way, good question OP.

In system installation, there are three option to choose if I am not mistaken.
1.  upgrade of the OS system
2.  installing the OS without reformatting the hardisk
3.  installing the OS with an option of reformatting the hardisk.

If you choose 1 and 2 your electrum files will not be deleted only the third option will delete your files since you formatting the harddisk will automatically delete the file.


You can recover your wallet if you have the private key, or the seed phrases.  There is also file recovery software to recover files even though the storage is formatted.  But it is useless if you failed to remember the password of the electrum JSON file (wallet).

Everything will be deleted when you reinstall operating system, it's common sense, but before that you should have physical backup of your private keys or seed words written on paper.
You can always recover your funds after installing Electrum again and importing your backup, so there is no need to worry if you did everything correctly.
For sake of better security I would encrypt hard drive before installing new operating system, and use separate laptop for Bitcoin.

It's one thing to reinstall operating system on laptop, and totally different to reinstall only Electrum wallet, but don't really on any keys stored in digital form on your hard drive.

No, the coins won't be deleted, just the wallet will be. To recover, you can recreate your wallet using a private key or run a file recovery software. There's a fair chance you can get your wallet.dat back.

Download and verify your wallet.
Guide to safely download and verify Electrum wallet (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5240594.0)

Always backup your wallet offline and not only in technical devices like desktop computer, laptop, mobile phone, USB sticks as you will fall to OP case.

Do not store backup in gmail, on Telegram, Facebook, Twitter messages, third party storage services like Google Drive, Dropbox. Your accounts can be hacked or those platforms can have data leaks.

If they have data leaks, they won't compensate your loses.

Yes, you are correct unfortunately. I was doing some file recovery on a daily basis some time ago and success rate was quite high. But man, time flies and I realized that it happened ~10 years ago and most drives were like 2TB HDDs and barely 10-20% full. So I have to agree, with TRIM and smaller SSD sizes you're in trouble!

For this one, I know that installing from the official website always provides more value. The same goes for the advice to always keep the seed phrase safe.

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Thanks for all the answers. When I install my laptop, the most important thing I need to do for assets stored in wallets like Electrum is to make sure the seed phrase is saved which I will retrieve again to back up by entering it.

For the sync process, how long does it take to complete (100%) according to your experience.

Electrum is a SPV wallet which means that you don't have to download the full blockchain.
In electrum, you connect to a server and get only the transactions data of your own wallet, so that it can display your transactions history, the correct balance of your wallet and the list of your UTXOs.
If you have made/received many transactions before, it may take a few minutes. If you have never made any transaction, it would take a few seconds.

Note that you'll also lose your address Labels if recover your funds from seed. Depending on how you use Electrum, that may be bad for privacy or you may need payment records for taxes or something.

How does that happen?

May I recommend to make regular backups of all important data? "Unknowingly reinstalling" isn't very likely (for most users), but hard drives fail and you wouldn't be the first to lose data.

No. That's not true LoyceV. It's just an example or a simulation of what I call if under certain conditions it happens. For now I'm sticking with an old Laptop (LENOVO Core i.5) and a small amount of assets are still safe in Electrum installed.

Of course, it's okay because it's a very good suggestion to keep the asset safe.