Always be prepared! (Wallet.dat loss)

[btcrun]

Hey there!

If you are like me and experiment a lot with your BTC and your wallet, than you should be prepared!

I tried to push my wallet.dat over to another PC and did this trough a USB stick. Deleted it on the first PC just to see that the USB stick wasn't working anymore on the second PC!!! (Bricks were sh$t)

Luckily I have this little tool (http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download/standard or http://www.filehippo.com/download_recuva) installed on every of my PCs!
With just a few clicks I got my wallet.dat unerased and everything went ok

So if you think this could happen to you, you should think about installing this little tool or any other Recovery/unerase tool just in case!
Because installing it after the loss could be fatal to your wallet.dat

Best regards!

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[ThePok]

Nono,

if you can restore the Wallet.dat with such an tool you didn't delet it proper!

Someone could (far in the future) buy/find you HDD and restore that wallet.dat too!

Make proper encrypted BACKUPS! Thats the only solution! Dont relay on such tools...

[btcrun]

I know that it wasn't deleted properly! I have my PC set to delete empty space once daily with a 7-pass erase cycle

I was lucky that it wasn't at that time of the day! So i could restore the file.

I also know that i should have erased the file properly first hand...but I (luckily) didn't

[xcarbon1]

thanks for the info buddy.

[ianspain]

thanks, best to be prepared

[btcrun]

TheMoreYouKnow! you're welcome!

[SHlFT]

I always use Recuva to recover my accidentally deleted files on my computer also

[bitcoins5411]

Encrypt your wallet.dat file and store it on Dropbox, Google Docs, or somewhere else that you can get to.

[Yeti]

Uhm... spam, anyone? Why not use my NiftyRecoverTool(sm) for only $100??!?

Better yet, send me your wallet.dat so you can always restore it when you are st00pid enough to delete it before completing the transfer (and not having several backups...).

[btcrun]

Wow Yeti, what is your problem?

First thing: The programm is free!
Second: I'm talking about a wallet with >~10BTC (So I wasn't concerned about backing it up! Also at that time I didn't know about the 100-key-pool in someone's wallet.dat. I believed, that every time I did a transaction I had to make a new backup (which is only neccesary before you hit the 100-key-limit)).
Third: I only wanted to give people a little advice.

So please don't be mad, that at one point I was new to BTC (what is this subforum called again?).

Best regards!

[Gabi]

Nono,

if you can restore the Wallet.dat with such an tool you didn't delet it proper!

Someone could (far in the future) buy/find you HDD and restore that wallet.dat too!

Make proper encrypted BACKUPS! Thats the only solution! Dont relay on such tools...

Best way to sovle it is to move bitcoins in a NEW wallet if you change hdd or what else. So even if someone find it well it has 0 bitcoins inside

[Yeti]

I'm not mad, just cautious.

I don't know what percentage you get for promoting this tool, but when I click the download button it displays a fat "pay €19.95 to download" button. While it may be free, inexperienced users might be tempted to pay that "low price" just as they buy free OpenOffice.org for €90 from some site that managed to be SEOd to #1 on Google.

Even if you are not advertising for this tool, it's still a much better practice to keep backups than to try and undelete the wallet. It may be overwritten already or corrupted or just plain lost beyond recovery.

Then, 10 BTC is not small money imho. Trusting an USB stick with ~$140 is not exactly smart, seeing how often especially cheap models tend to corrupt without prior notice. I was "concerned about backing up" the minute I had a single coin in my wallet.

No problem that you are new to Bitcoin, but you should have read some info about it in the Wiki, specifically the prominently promoted article Securing your wallet and you would have known that you have no actual coins in your wallet, "just" the private keys to spend them so your wallet doesn't change with each transaction (unless the client generates a new receiving address in the process).

The plus side of storing your wallet encrypted on some cloud server (I use Dropbox): I can access from every PC in the world, even if all my machines would break and I somehow wouldn't be able to get to work.

[btcrun]

Ok, I get it.
You don't have to pay the 19,95$, it's only if you want to support.
Here are the actual download pages http://www.filehippo.com/download_recuva or http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download/standard (I'll change it in my first post, too).

And it maybe was a bit missleading, but this happened to me in the past, I am now aware of how the system works
Just wanted to share my experience and how it worked out for me.