Critical Old Wallet Issue - Just Lost All of My Labels

[btcbot]

I finally installed an updated Electrum after using 2.5.4 for the past year or so and my hot wallet, with all of my labels to transactions has been lost.  I restored it fine - but the process for losing it was truly scary and a mess.

When I attempted to load my old hot wallet I got a message saying something about unsupported multiple identity wallets? (which I had no idea my hot wallet was) and that it would now 'Save' it to a couple of wallets with the locations of the new files.  I said OK, assuming idiotically that I'd be able to find them in the default wallet location folder. 

I have no idea what happened.  I've looked for them in the AppData/Roaming/Electrum/wallets folder.  I run searches on today's modified *.dat files and now I'm just at a loss.  Where are they? 

I recovered the wallet through the seed, but I really need my labels for my taxes.

I'm an old progger.  And I feel that this was a mess.  I don't care what your program is supposed to do, but user data is sacrosanct.  It seems that 'default_wallet' gets over-written under certain circumstances? 

Sorry to rant, but I'd appreciate any help in finding my old wallets and where 2.7.18 put them. 

[1715674759]

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[1715674759]

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[1715674759]

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[ThomasV]

if your wallet was split, the new wallets do not have .dat extensions.
open the wallet folder from electrum 'File>Open' to view them

[btcbot]

That folder now has only the un-labeled newly restored from seed wallets, as it goes to a folder that is a work folder I never set, but made backups to.

Just to add to the confusion, is it possible that a few failed seed-recovery attempts (while looking for the right hot wallet seed that I'd saved) might have caused the over-writes of the wallets?  

In other words, when I couldn't find the 'new' hot wallets I made a few attempts to restore from seed.  At no point, though was I given a 'file exists' warning.  

In the Windows Roaming directory with the wallets I've found I found a 'default_wallet.deterministic' and a 'default_wallet.imported.'  

That was probably that split wallet before one of my seed attempts over-wrote them?

[ThomasV]

no, Electrum will never overwrite an existing wallet file.

However, it is possible that version 2.5 used a different default directory than AppData/Roaming/Electrum/wallets
I am no Windows user, so I don't know what that path would be. maybe LocalAppData ?

[ThomasV]

In the Windows Roaming directory with the wallets I've found I found a 'default_wallet.deterministic' and a 'default_wallet.imported.'  

That was probably that split wallet before one of my seed attempts over-wrote them?

yes these are the files you are looking for.
your seed attempts did not overwrite them.

[btcbot]

That's strange, because those two wallets, default_wallet.deterministic and default_wallet.imported were both ancient, from 2013 and long-discarded.  Modified today, though... maybe the wallet splitting process took the wrong default_wallet to split? 

Btw... I just found a few more wallets, modified today, in this folder, which seems weird:

C:\Users\btcbot\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Electrum

VirtualStore?

[btcbot]

Actually, I'm almost certain that that's what happened now.  (That it likely chose the default_wallet.dat file from the Roaming directory when it was, this morning, in the Program Files/Electrum directory.)

This morning, I ran my usual bash script:

cd /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Electrum/
./electrum & ./electrum -w seedless-orig.dat

Until I'd installed 2.7.18, this would load a default_wallet.dat hot wallet from the Program Files/Electrum directory and my cold storage wallet from that same directory.  

Both of those files disappeared this morning from that directory.  There are now no longer any wallet files in:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Electrum

So, Electrum actually deleted two wallet files of mine, this morning.  I saw them after the installation in the folder when I started searching.  One minute they were there, the next they were gone.  

EDIT: Just out of curiosity, I just did a search over my hard drive for 'seedless-orig.dat'.  That was one of the wallets tha I claimed was deleted.  It now seems like it was moved to a series, or what looks like 9 locations, similar to this:

C:\Users\btcbot\AppData\Local\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Electrum

I found 9 copies, modified from the last time I opened it.  I don't know if these are just Windows soft-links or what. 

A similar search over my hard drive for 'default_wallet.dat' produced nothing.