Reformatted hard drive, realized wallet file not in backed up bitcoin folder

[Bert]

Maybe add a backup option in the client. You click on backup and it prompts you with which drive do you want to save the wallet.dat as wallet-yyyymmddhhmmss.dat ?

+1

+2

I added a request for this, not sure if it will be picked up by a developer, but no harm in trying
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/370

[PandaMiner]

The wallet.data file has a lot of info in it... number of blocks, addresses... what we need is the Balance! Where do you get that from? If you find a partial file, which part is paramount?

[BkkCoins]

What you really need is the private key - but I'm not familiar with the format and how to find that in the file. The important thing is to save any part of the file you find because later you may get help with extracting the key. Without they key, having addresses, balance or anything else won't matter - you cannot do anything with the money without the key.

[wacked]

Simply backup your wallet.dat before you start accepting payments, and have it in more than one remote location. If you lose a drive on your system you can recover the wallet.dat you backed up at any one of your other numerous locations, restore it, and then after downloading the block chain to that wallet you have your money.

Losing a hard drive can occur at anytime, be it you lose your wallet.dat or you lose your photos or financial data etc.
Backup your data and store it offsite if it's important to you.

Waiting until after the fact is always the worst case.

With a fresh reinstall, I open up the bitcoin program, and viola. 0 BTC.

This is a argument against bitcoin.  It would be bad enough investing in something like precious metals or rare coins that could be lost, destroyed or stolen.  But this is now the second story I've read about someone that lost money due to hard drive problems.

I'm still lurking and considering.  I'm rooting for bitcoin, but stuff like this scares me.

BTW, both of these stories provide good arguments to use a more secure operating system than Windows.  Like what?  Almost anything available is more secure than Windows.  Ubuntu Linux, Fedora Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, PC-BSD or soon OpenIndiana (or maybe someday even Haiku).

[casascius]

What you really need is the private key - but I'm not familiar with the format and how to find that in the file. The important thing is to save any part of the file you find because later you may get help with extracting the key. Without they key, having addresses, balance or anything else won't matter - you cannot do anything with the money without the key.

Wallet extraction method by casascius

Search hard drive for bytes: 01 03 6b 65 79 41 04

Within each sector containing this sequence or adjacent to one that does:

Find the hex bytes 04 20.  The thirty two bytes following 04 20 is likely a private key. A wallet typically has 100 to 200 of them. Contact me in PM if you are able to recover any.

[Gabi]

The client require a much better way to manage the wallet.

Why it is auto-created the first time i start bitcoin? It should allow us to create the wallet.dat file, choose where we want to place it. Allow us then to open another one for example. Maybe a file NOT named wallet.dat too?

[makomk]

Alternatively, for the slightly less manual version of what casascius is suggesting, I've written a little Linux tool to scan disks for private keys using roughly this method and recover them to a new wallet.dat that can be loaded up in the Bitcoin client.