Can the encrypted wallet be recovered using the unencrypted?

[flatfly]

I do not believe I backed the encrypted wallet up on the flash drive.  If on some off chance I did, it is not showing up on the recovery tools.  Perhaps I will mess with this hex thing once I determine if I cannot recover the laptop

Have you tried to check your Dropbox access logs as I mentioned?
If you can't find them, let me know and I'll help you out.

[sethsethseth]

yeah i checked that.  the computer had a logon password, and they didnt steal the charger, and it was constantly crashing and I had to boot it like 8 times to get it to load windows properly, so the thief would probably just wipe it.  Probably still recoverable if I get it back though.

[kjj]

Still a tiny chance of recovering the laptop.  The encrypted wallet is not on the flash drives.  In my mind at the time, I thought that encrypting the wallet was a repeatable process just like encrypting any other file, so I did not think to back it up again.

Yes the developers really screwed that one up. That's why bitcoin still deserves beta status.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/1884

Don't be too hard on the devs.  Wallet encryption has been around for like a year, and we are just now noticing this problem, which suggests that it is not obvious except in hindsight.

[FactoredPrimes]

Why does the standard client always send the change to a new address?? It would make more sense to send the change back to one of the sending addresses.

[kjj]

Why does the standard client always send the change to a new address?? It would make more sense to send the change back to one of the sending addresses.

Sending to a new address leaks the least privacy.  Also, there is no concept of a sending address in the bitcoin system.

[sunnankar]

Something needs to be changed if I really can't get these coins back.  It is reasonable for me to think that if I have an unencrypted file, back it up, and then encrypt one of them, that I can derive the encrypted version from the unencrypted one if I know the password.  There should be a warning in there somewhere.  I am sick over losing this many coins.

As far as creating a safe and secure backup of private keys, what about (1) using an offline computer to create a wallet address via bitaddress.org's html/javascript then (2) placing the keys into a TrueCrypt volume and (3) transferring the TrueCrypt volume, or offline generated transaction, via USB to an online computer and backing up to multiple places like Dropbox, AWS, Google Drive, etc.

Here is the code to create offline wallets and generate offline transactions.

Is there a flaw in this procedure that I am not seeing?

[FreeMoney]

Why does the standard client always send the change to a new address?? It would make more sense to send the change back to one of the sending addresses.

Sending to a new address leaks the least privacy.  Also, there is no concept of a sending address in the bitcoin system.

Sending back to one of the input addresses could be an optional setting.