I opened my wallet just now to keep the wallet currently synched and the wallet address was different and my BTC was gone. I went to my backup Wallet.dat and replaced it with the one that was in the roaming file and now my BTC is back.
What is going on with this? How can i possibly trust this thing with any amount of BTC when it just replaces my wallet.dat ??
Any explanation for this?
The wallet.dat file holds your private keys. If those private keys have bitcoins associated with them and you load the client with access to that wallet.dat, it will show those bitcoins. If you load a fresh wallet.dat or one with no bitcoins associated with the private keys, it will show that you control zero bitcoins.
The block chain may have to be fully synced to see your most recent transactions.
It's pretty straightforward.
If you have a computer that is problematic (hardware or software issues), any number of things could be going wrong.
If you are just swapping wallet.dat files willy nilly without knowing what you are doing, you may run into issues.
Also, I wouldn't store private keys on any computer which is connected to a network.