What are the symptoms ?You open MultiBit and instead of seeing your wallet(s) in the Wallet list, you don't see anything.
What can you do when this happens ?Most likely you will still have your wallet(s) on your disk.
In the 'Help | Help Contents' menu option there is a section called 'Troubleshooting'. This describes where MultiBit stores the default wallet (multibit.wallet). This help is also available here :
https://multibit.org/help_troubleshooting.htmlHave a look in that directory. You can open any wallet there using the 'File | Open' option. The transactions might be a bit out of date but you can fix that using a 'Tools | Reset blockchain and transactions'.
If you created a new wallet and stored it in another directory then you will have to look there.
Are there any preventative measures I can take ?The main cause of the list of wallets disappearing on start up is that MultiBit freezes and you have to 'force quit' it. One of the ways this can happen is if you do multiple 'import private key' or 'reset blockchain and transactions' without letting MultiBit fully sync. You can avoid this by always letting MultiBit sync fully.
Also, you can backup your wallets in two ways:
1) Save the multibit.wallet and multibit.info file onto another medium, say a USB drive.
2) Export the private keys to an encrypted file using Tools ! Export Private Keys.
What plans are there to fix this in MultiBit ?There are a number of improvements planned:
1) Update the MultiBit code to use bitcoinj v0.8, which has a number of improvements to do with locking (this should reduce the number of times MultiBit freezes).
2) With the encrypted wallet code, when you add or change a password or add private keys MultiBit automatically exports a timestamped private key export file. This is a safety copy of your private keys that you can use to recreate a wallet.
3) I am planning to improve the blockchain syncing so that it will queue up requests to sync so that it only does one thing at a time.
