Bitcoin Forum

Restarted my wallet, and suddenly poof. Wallet is redownloading blockchain, and old wallet.dat is missing. How to recover?

How did you lose it actually?
I don't think that it will be possible to recover it if you had no backup

Wallet is not hacked, opened the wallet and it started downloading blockchain old wallet.dat was gone.

Do you have a backup from before it happened?

What OS?  

No backup, windows.

It really depends on how these files disappeared, but you could attempt to use undelete utilities to recover the files... there used to be a few free ones out there, I haven't used one in a while.

Have you looked directly at the location that the client keeps the wallet.dat?
if Vista/7/8, I believe this is C:\Users\YourUserName\Appdata\Roaming\BitCoin
Curious what files/folders are in there right now...

I've never had the client touch the wallet.dat file before, amongst many different corruptions of the blockchain and full re-downloads, so I would be surprised if it was the Bitcoin client itself that removed the wallet.dat... what version are you using?

C:\Users\YourUserName\Appdata\Roaming\BitCoin has the new wallet, old wallet was deleted following full re-download.

'Recuva' was a program I have used in the past, and appears to still be free on first look. You could give this a try and have it attempt to recover from the specific location of the wallet.dat

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download

Other methods?

Bitcoins are gone for good?

... You really should back up your wallet ASAP and 100% should before sending BTC to it..

If a recovery tool can't find the file, you didn't back it up and you didn't write down your private/public keys.. things are very bad.

Help appreciated

If you didn't back the wallet.dat up before funding it, the only help we can give is to make sure you do that next time. Sorry for your loss.

Just for information here, Recuva and other file recovery utilities find "deleted" files on your disk because they are marked as "free space" by Windows, but until they are overwritten, they can still be recovered.
If you accidentally delete any file, what you should do is immediately shut down your computer so no more hard drive writing is done, so there is a lesser chance that the sector(s) where the file resides on gets overwritten.

Perhaps on first run, the Bitcoin client should warn users to make a wallet backup immediately and then also after sending bitcoins too. I wonder it would be worth even having it spawn many backups, whenever it generates new addresses from loose change.

OP's not been clear exactly but perhaps overwrote the client by unzipping a fresh version to the same place. User error, replace user and press any key to continue.

Bitcoin software deleted wallet.dat, I launched bitcoin wallet, and noticed blockchain re-download. BTC was missing.

You should always make a backup of the wallet.

Not likely, there isn't any code in the Bitcoin client that ever deletes wallet.dat.  Since your client also started redownloading the blockchain, it means something else nuked your Bitcoin data directory altogether (blockchain data and wallet.dat and all).  Or else you're logged in as a different user in Windows.  Searching your whole hard drive for files named wallet.dat doesn't turn anything up?

I think that it's almost impossible that OP overwrote it with a fresh Bitcoin client version because the Bitcoin zipped files do NOT contain a wallet.dat file, or anything but the program files as far as I know.

Yes, I don't know in Windoh's whether a folder might delete the existing folder or something clumsy that puts a non existent wallet in place of the existing one.. and then recreates it once it's started. OP unclear exactly what they did do, so user error seems likely.

Will attempt this method.

Are you booted into Windows on the computer you want to recover the wallet from?
If so, I would STRONGLY advise you to boot from a USB/CD/DVD because using that hard drive more will just result in a lesser chance of recovering the wallet.

New bitcoin client may have caused this issue.

The program is in a different folder than the wallet & blockchain.  The "data directory" is never touched when you install a new version.

Looking to resolve this issue

Not to challenge your intelligence, but I assume you've done a simple 'search' on your entire drive for 'wallet.dat'  in case you drag & dropped it somewhere??   :o

And have you checked the blockchain to see if any of your coins have moved?  

There is also the off chance that the updated client you downloaded was not authentic or maybe you just have a wallet stealing trojan sitting on your machine…

Unfortunately, in either situation, it seems unlikely you will recover the coins.

If it is an extreme amount of coins, you may be able to pay for a forensic data recovery service?   :-\



EDIT: I will also add you could attempt using 'system restore', but I am pretty sure it doesn't backup the AppData folder

I don't know what happened to my original response to this - probably someone deleted it - but.....

Are you trying to recover a wallet from a computer that belongs to YOU?

Why would you assume it doesn't belong to him/her?  ???

BTC is located in the wallet unmoved.

Hey, I seen a lot of things!

Besides the only way for this to happen is if he logged in with a different account.
Nothing else makes sense to me.

That being said, if the OP can prove that he/she is the rightful owner of that PC/Laptop I can recover his/her wallet and it doesn't even matter if he/she formatted their drive 10 times by now.

thats disaster, do backups man, put them in diffirent spots etc.
now you can recover files but dont do writes any.... coz that would disable this opportunity

Yes, all I need is an image of the drive ;)
The rest is up to me ;)

EDIT: The OP can prove he/she owns the PC/Laptop by providing me with the Log in details - not that I need it - but to make sure.
EDIT 2: Just in case, I can recover the wallet before I am given any Log in details.

What version of windows? If its Vista+ then getting it back is easy peasy.... enter VSS ( a godsend for situations like this)

Right click on the folder where wallet.dat should be, select 'restore previous versions' ... if VSS is set up properly on ur system you will see several folders listed w/ date stamps .. if so, just open a folder that has a timestamp before your wallet.dat went missing, and copy wallet.dat out of it and into the spot where its missing.
Problem solved.

You do realize that you are telling a newbie how to recover wallet.dat from a PC that we have no idea if it belongs to him/her right?

So, have several others....
If its not theirs then, the original person should have had the wallet.dat encrypted =P

True that!

The OP isn't very informative on what happened to the full extend.

I can't remember having read which windows version he uses. This could be vital info.
If it's any recent version with standard setup of primary partition C:\ he might use "recent version" feature for the Bitcoin folder to extract any older/recent version of wallet.dat, even if it got deleted. I would try that first (in the non-destructive way). But read next paragraph first and obey the advise.

But the very first step to do is to make as early as possible a complete image backup of the Windows partition which holds the vital data.
It depends on how many Bitcoins might be in danger, but I'd do that even for less than one Bitcoin. The basic idea is to be able to recover a known starting state before tinkering with the system while trying to fix the issue. If you do something wrong, breath smoothly, and recover your old state to start again.

The OP said that his Bitcoin client started to reload the blockchain. (We still don't know which version of the Bitcoin client the OP uses. You get the point? Pretty scarce information policy by the OP... why that? Do I smell something fishy? Strange that a lot of other posters didn't mind to ask obvious questions...). I have no idea why the Bitcoin client felt the need to reload the blockchain, but again valuable information isn't available to judge. (OK, OP might not be expert enough to know what is important and what isn't.)
The walled.dat might be just fine. As long as the blockchain data hasn't been downloaded, I guess, the Bitcoin client won't show much to be in the wallet.dat (I might be wrong here, as it could flag the Bitcoins in the (old) wallet.dat as still unconfirmed.)
As others said, normal client won't touch the data directory in any harmful way.

I won't emphasize too much on the unspeakable stupidity to not have any backups, especially when substantial amounts of Bitcoins are in question. So, I guess you don't care much about the data on your hard drive which could fail at any time, btw. I have seen hard drives passing away, though not completely by surprise. Well, it happens here and there...

I hope you can recover your lost data and I wish you learn your lesson to show more respect to your valuable data goods on your hard drive. Not all data deserve it, Bitcoins surely do!

sounds like the OP logged in as a different user, or Windows created a new profile because it was corrupted.  Probably the old wallet.dat is around on the HD somewhere else.

Try searching in C:\Users for another directory

Will

WIN 7

search all your drives for wallet.dat !

maybe you had assigned the data directory to a different location on your previous install.

Mine is on a different Drive than C:

If it can't open the wallet.dat file, I think it renames it and creates a new one. I could be wrong, but it definitely creates a blk0001.dat file and replaces the wallet.dat. I've had several wallet's do that. I'm not sure what causes it. I would check to see if you have that file though.