Hello, I created a Bitcoin Core wallet on my PC a few weeks ago. Yesterday I created a new partition on my hard drive and accidentally erased the entire blockchain along with my wallet.dat file. Fortunately, I had put a copy of my wallet.dat on a thumb drive. So, today I started redownloading the blockchain and I imported my wallet.dat. I see the transaction history, but currently my Available, Pending, and Total balances are 0.00000000 BTC.
question1: Will my balances automatically update after the blockchain finishes downloading?
question2: Is there a way to create a mnemonic recovery phrase for my wallet.dat file? After this scare, I'd like to back up my funds in as many ways as possible. If someone cares explain to me how I can do this, or why I cannot, that would be much appreciated.
thanks for helpin a noobie.
If the private keys that had balance (UTXO's) are in the wallet.dat, yes. You probably haven't caught up yet to the block in which the transaction was made to your adress, hence why there is no balance yet. I'd indeed recommend you to wait untill the blockchain has been fully synced.
question2: Is there a way to create a mnemonic recovery phrase for my wallet.dat file? After this scare, I'd like to back up my funds in as many ways as possible. If someone cares explain to me how I can do this, or why I cannot, that would be much appreciated.
The closest you can get to a seed is using a hierarchical deterministic wallet, and save your master private key ( which i believe can be imported to any BIP32 compatible wallet, or derivator which can be found online, something like this,
https://github.com/prusnak/bip32utils ( ! Use at own risk !)
