MultiBit crash & lost wallet (Mac)

[tyburg]

I'd like to post this to a more appropriate forum, but I just made this account so here goes.

I started using MultiBit earlier this week and absolutely loved it. I had moved my 12 BTC (all the BTC that I ... had) from Coinbase to Multibit. I had the client open today, noticed my Mac was getting really hot, noticed the application was frozen, had to force quit it, reopened, and my wallet is completely gone.

I'm running a file recovery application and am crossing my fingers, but losing that much money makes me feel sick. It shouldn't be this easy to lose a wallet. Obviously, I should have made a backup of the file, granted. But, losing it from the program crashing and not because of any negligence on my partis a bit worrisome.

Anyone else have this happen? Any suggestions?

[b¡tco¡n]

Just don't do anything on that PC until you have recovered the wallet. It could still be on disk but invisible to the file system.

I'm sure the wallet is still there somewhere.

[tyburg]

I'm running Mackeeper now. Nothing so far, though. Damn, this sucks.

[eyci]

Cross-posted this in the Multibit forum.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=159345.0

[tyburg]

Thank you both for the replies. Mackeeper didn't find anything, but I stayed up another hour last night and ran another program called Phoenix Mac Data Recovery and it found the damn wallet. I had to pay $99 to recover the files, but it was worth it for the quantity of Bitcoins that I had lost.

I created a new wallet, moved the funds over, cleared the old wallet, backed up the new wallet, exported the private key, etc etc. Sheesh, that was a stressful way to end the night.

Thanks again.

[tyburg]

Maybe I didn't get the wallet back. It seems I can import the file, but am having trouble sending out coins. I found a handful of Multibit wallet files. Maybe I did something wrong?

[tyburg]

I sent this in an email to Jim as well, but I recovered what I thought to be the wallet (multibit.wallet, and a bunch of other ".wallet" files). I couldn't import multibit.wallet (see the following error):

 Could not load the wallet file the error message was "com.google.protobuf.InvalidProtocolBufferException While parsing a protocol message, the input ended unexpectedly in the middle of a field. This could mean either than the input has been truncated or that an embedded message misreported its own length."

So I tried adding one of the other wallets, and the balance showed up successfully. For some reason, though, I can't send money OUT of the wallet, thinking that I'm somehow just seeing the public information and do not have full access. I'm at work now, so I can't try anything further until I get home, but I hope I can sort it out.