Help, bitcoins disappeared in transfer!

[Nat Philosopher]

I was sending bitcoins from wallet1 to wallet2 on the same machine in Bitcoin-QT.
Open Bitcoin-QT with wallet1. Send the bitcoins. close Bitcoin-QT. mv wallet.dat wallet1.dat.
mv wallet2.dat wallet.dat

I did it several times to make sure it was working, then did a relatively large one.
The large one has not arrived!
When I load wallet1, it says it is confirmed with the bitcoins missing, but the top transaction on the list, the big move to the other one, shows zero confirmations. This transaction does appear to show the right address, which was stored in my address book, and had worked in the tests. But it doesn't make any visible progress.
When I load wallet 2, I see no sign of the incoming bitcoins.

Help! What happened? How do I recover this? I have backups at every stage.

[DannyHamilton]

I was sending bitcoins from wallet1 to wallet2 on the same machine in Bitcoin-QT.
Open Bitcoin-QT with wallet1. Send the bitcoins. close Bitcoin-QT. mv wallet.dat wallet1.dat.
mv wallet2.dat wallet.dat

I did it several times to make sure it was working, then did a relatively large one.
The large one has not arrived!
When I load wallet1, it says it is confirmed with the bitcoins missing, but the top transaction on the list, the big move to the other one, shows zero confirmations. This transaction does appear to show the right address, which was stored in my address book, and had worked in the tests. But it doesn't make any visible progress.
When I load wallet 2, I see no sign of the incoming bitcoins.

Help! What happened? How do I recover this? I have backups at every stage.

As stated, check the blockchain.info website and see if the transaction shows as confirmed there. If so, then you should be ok.

Next step is to run the wallet with the rescan command line option.

[Nat Philosopher]

How do I look for the transaction on blockchain.info?
I entered the first characters in the destination address into the search window,
and it said firstbits not found.
Was that the right procedure for search?
The result is a little surprising to me because some other transactions to that destination had succeeded.

However, the status of the transaction on the sending wallet now says: 3 of 6 confirmations, so I am a little less panicky,
I presume it is just taking a long time for some reason.

Thanks for your help.

[Nat Philosopher]

OK, sorry false alarm. It appears to be arriving slowly. Thanks much. The other transactions were fast, for some reason, and this one was very slow so confused me. Thanks again.

[BurtW]

OK, sorry false alarm. It appears to be arriving slowly. Thanks much. The other transactions were fast, for some reason, and this one was very slow so confused me. Thanks again.

If you give us the address you were sending the BTC to then we can probably tell you exactly why it took a long time - if you care.

[xchanga.com]

anyone that looses 1 btc now will be very worried for it because btc is high in value now.