Wallet Restore Question

[thejlj]

Hi all,

I recently reformatted my PC and have restored my wallet on the newest version of Multibit Classic, however after the restore I am missing one of my receive addresses (and all the BTC in it!)
I have a recent backup of the wallet/info file from my pre-formatted PC, but it looks like I only have a key backup of my original address, and not the other receiving address.
Are my worst fears confirmed and the BTC lost?

[jim618]

Yes unfortunately the old MultiBit Classic's wallet was not deterministic so you had to make a new backup every time you created more receiving addresses.

If you backed it up when you had, say, 10 receiving addresses and then created an 11th your PC reformat would have deleted all the copies of the 11th private key on your machine.

It is possible that the old wallet is still written on the disk if you didn't do a full disk format - if it was a large sum it might be worth using a disk recovery company/ program to try to recover it. Chances aren't great though of recovering it though to be honest.


It is no help to the OP, but you can regenerate all your wallet's private keys and addresses in MultiBit HD from your wallet words.

[thejlj]

I had figured as much, but just wanted to double check.
Thanks for the reply Jim.

Data recovery services cant always determine file types, are there any distinguishing features I should look for in the key file? i.e. Is there a particular string format/length I can search for in the recovered files?

[jim618]

The export file format for key files is detailed here:
https://multibit.org/en/help/v0.5/help_exportingPrivateKeys.html

The first few characters of the encrypted file are always the same so that would be good to look for.