Upgrading from Bitcoin-Qt 0.6.2.2 to 0.8

[tinyapps]

First of all, many thanks for providing this forum.

I was running Bitcoin-Qt 0.6.2.2, which displayed my Bitcoin balance (56.20691149) properly:

http://tinyapps.org/0622.png

However, when I upgraded to Bitcoin-Qt 0.8.0, the balance changed to zero and the correct amount was showing as unconfirmed:

http://tinyapps.org/08.png

Also, the 0.6.2.2 version shows the last received block was generated 310 days ago:

http://tinyapps.org/0622b.png

while version 0.8.0 says it was 715 days ago:

http://tinyapps.org/08b.png

Has anyone else seen this? Is it normal? Should I just stick with 0.6.2.2 and let it finish catching up, or run 0.8.0 instead?

Sincerely,

Miles

[mwag]

Looks normal. I would let 0.8 catch up.

[RodeoX]

I think it will confirm when your caught up. It is always a good idea to make a backup of the wallet.dat file before an upgrade. Just in case.

[tinyapps]

Thank you for taking the time to reply, mwag and RodeoX - very much appreciated!

Will let 0.8.0 run uninterrupted and report back when it's done!

[tinyapps]

Thanks again, mwag and RodeoX!

After catching up, Bitcoin-Qt 0.8.0 showed the correct balance.

What a difference a year makes! The old blockchain (compromised of blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat apparently) was well under 2GB. It looks like Bitcoin-Qt 0.8.0 created a new subdirectory called "blocks" which is full of .dat files exceeding 7GB! No wonder it took so long to catch up. Before too long I'll need a dedicated machine just to host my wallet!

Again, thanks so much for the encouragement to let the upgrade process finish.