Found an old wallet file from 3 years ago, can't open it?

[someguy76]

I found an old file called "Bitcoin_wallet_7-4-2017.dat" in a backup that I have. I downloaded the entire ledger with bitcoin core and copied the DAT file into the "wallets" directory. When I try to open it it just loads their forever, not doing anything.

Questions:

1.) How do I get the address out of this wallet dat file?

2.) When you backup a wallet, you just need the dat file right? Nothing else? Maybe it isn't a complete backup

3.) Any other way to get into what this wallet has?


Note I tried this: https://cryptomining-blog.com/9488-how-to-easily-recover-old-wallet-dat-private-keys-with-pywallet/

But it didn't work. Error:

WARNING:root:pycrypto or libssl not found, decryption may be slow

    Traceback (most recent call last):

    File "c:\zip\pywallet.py", line 2111, in parse_wallet

    d.update(parse_BlockLocator(vds))

    TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable

Tried electrum too, that gave me a long hex error.

[someguy76]

I think I found the address of my old wallet from a transaction on my cell phone where bitcoin is installed, probably sent as a test years ago.  Not sure if this is helpful or not.

[Hispo]

Wait, if this is a backup isn't it supposed to be encrypted?

[someguy76]

Wait, if this is a backup isn't it supposed to be encrypted?

You mean it has a passphrase? I suppose.  But when I open the wallet I thought it was suppose to ask me for the passphrase so decrypt it?  Or am I missing something?

[Hispo]

Wait, if this is a backup isn't it supposed to be encrypted?

You mean it has a passphrase? I suppose.  But when I open the wallet I thought it was suppose to ask me for the passphrase so decrypt it?  Or am I missing something?

Most of the wallets ask you for a password and a pin to encrypt the private keys, so you can store them in a USB memory (or even on Google Drive if your password is strong and you have a moderate amount of money).

When you use an external program to access the keys they will require the password or both the password and the pin (in the case of the Schildbach wallet)

[someguy76]

[Solved] I'm dumb, bitcoin core eventually opened the wallet after an hour.  No password/passphrase though.  But, I keep this wallet in an encrypted mount with veracrypt so it is kinda safe.

I should move all the BTC in this wallet to a new wallet though right?  A safer one?  Any suggestions?

[Hispo]

[Solved] I'm dumb, bitcoin core eventually opened the wallet after an hour.  No password/passphrase though.  But, I keep this wallet in an encrypted mount with veracrypt so it is kinda safe.

I should move all the BTC in this wallet to a new wallet though right?  A safer one?  Any suggestions?

Ah, well. I am glad you solved it.

Not sure whether you should or not! If you have a hardware wallet I guess it is an option.
But if that money remained safe all this time there with no problem, I guess it is okey unless your computer is compromised in some way.

Enjoy your BTC!

[mocacinno]

[Solved] I'm dumb, bitcoin core eventually opened the wallet after an hour.  No password/passphrase though.  But, I keep this wallet in an encrypted mount with veracrypt so it is kinda safe.

I should move all the BTC in this wallet to a new wallet though right?  A safer one?  Any suggestions?

This is kind of tricky... If there's even a small chance somebody had access to your unencrypted wallet, moving your funds would be wise... However, it's not like you saved your wallet file on cloud storage, right?

As long as you're 100% certain nobody could have had access to your wallet, you should be ok... On the other hand: creating a new (encrypted) wallet only takes a couple of minutes, the weekend is allmost there (and average transaction fees usually drop during the weekend) so moving your funds to a new wallet would probably only cost you a little bit in fees.

If you hold a lot of funds, go for a ledger or a trezor, or properly learn how to create paper wallets, or do an airgapped setup...

[someguy76]

[Solved] I'm dumb, bitcoin core eventually opened the wallet after an hour.  No password/passphrase though.  But, I keep this wallet in an encrypted mount with veracrypt so it is kinda safe.

I should move all the BTC in this wallet to a new wallet though right?  A safer one?  Any suggestions?

This is kind of tricky... If there's even a small chance somebody had access to your unencrypted wallet, moving your funds would be wise... However, it's not like you saved your wallet file on cloud storage, right?

Nah it is an encrypted 4 gig file that can only be mounted with veracrypt with a strong password.  I keep it on my local machine and it backs up to my server computer in the other room which has a Raid5 configuration in Ubuntu using openZFS.  I also encrypt that mount file with a different password with 7z and send backups to my brother every month over syncthing.  Overall, it is "safe", but it taking so long to open the wallet file had me worried.  It has over $5000 worth of bitcoin in it.

Side Question, any idea why it took Bitcoin Core so long to open the file?  It must have taken at least an hour...

[mocacinno]

Nah it is an encrypted 4 gig file that can only be mounted with veracrypt with a strong password.  I keep it on my local machine and it backs up to my server computer in the other room which has a Raid5 configuration in Ubuntu using openZFS.  I also encrypt that mount file with a different password with 7z and send backups to my brother every month over syncthing.  Overall, it is "safe", but it taking so long to open the wallet file had me worried.  It has over $5000 worth of bitcoin in it.

Side Question, any idea why it took Bitcoin Core so long to open the file?  It must have taken at least an hour...

bitcoin core needs to sync all blocks since you last opened it... So it probably took over an hour to do this. In the background it downloaded, verified and parsed all blocks since the last time you let it sync completely, updating your utxo db in the meantime.

IF you want to avoid this in the future, you'll probably want to switch to an SPV wallet. Such a wallet only downloads the block headers.

[someguy76]

I synced the entire blockchain, 350gig.  Or did you mean a different kind of sync?

[mocacinno]

I synced the entire blockchain, 350gig.  Or did you mean a different kind of sync?

A new block is added every 10 minutes (on average). If you synced your wallet 3 years ago, and you opened it today, it would have to download (3 * 365 * 24 * 6 ) = ~157680 blocks.

So, just to say, it's not because you sync'ed your wallet when you created it, it'll stay sync'ed forever.

If this is not the case, you can always look in your debug.log. Since you seem to be running a *nix OS, you can find the debug.log in ~/.bitcoin/

[someguy76]

Right, I mean I synced the entire ledger today before opening my wallet.  So everything should be synced up?

I looked at the debug.log file, I saw this:

2020-10-02T05:41:42Z [Bitcoin_wallet_7-4-2017.dat] Rescan completed in         4257163ms

For some reason it had to do some kind of rescan when I opened the wallet.

More in the logs:

2020-10-02T04:30:44Z Using BerkeleyDB version Berkeley DB 4.8.30: (April  9, 2010)
2020-10-02T04:30:44Z Using wallet /datapool/ledger/wallets/Bitcoin_wallet_7-4-2017.dat
2020-10-02T04:30:44Z init message: Loading wallet...
2020-10-02T04:30:44Z [Bitcoin_wallet_7-4-2017.dat] Wallet File Version = 130000
2020-10-02T04:30:44Z [Bitcoin_wallet_7-4-2017.dat] Keys: 0 plaintext, 203 encrypted, 203 w/ metadata, 203 total. Unknown wallet records: 0
2020-10-02T04:30:44Z [Bitcoin_wallet_7-4-2017.dat] Wallet completed loading in              51ms

[mocacinno]

Well, a rescan might indeed be the reason why it took your wallet an hour to load...

Looking at the lines you pasted, it looks like you loaded a different wallet.dat than "default" (initially, core will create a wallet in ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat).
This is no problem whatsoever, but if you switch wallets, a rescan will be executed by default... might be executed

EDIT: i actually made a mistake, rescanning probably doesn't happen every time you load a different wallet

[someguy76]

Looking at the lines you pasted, it looks like you loaded a different wallet.dat than "default" (initially, core will create a wallet in ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat).
This is no problem whatsoever, but if you switch wallets, a rescan will be executed by default...

Sorry can you help me understand this?  Why would loading a new wallet require a rescan?  Isn't a wallet something that stores your private key and transactions or something?  What is it that I'm rescanning?

[mocacinno]

--snip--

Sorry can you help me understand this?  Why would loading a new wallet require a rescan?  Isn't a wallet something that stores your private key and transactions or something?  What is it that I'm rescanning?

To be honest, i don't switch wallets very often... As a matter of fact, i run a node and the wallet is still a non-HD wallet (in other words, i haven't loaded a different wallet for many, many years). I just remember the last time i found an old wallet.dat (years ago) and i tried opening it, a rescan was also triggered. But i was probably guiding you in the wrong direction when i used the word "default". I just meanth that it doesn't supprise me if a rescan is triggered when you load an older wallet. I've updated my previous post accordingly.

This being said, it's very hard to give a precise answer as to what actually triggers a rescan for me. It's been a while since i last dived into bitcoin core's code, let alone kept track of all the changes. Everything depends on versions and specific situations i guess: Which version was used to generate your wallet.dat, which version you're running now, did you change anything to your wallet since last synchronisation, which was the last blockchain height when you last opened your wallet.dat, did you open multiple wallets at the same time, which parameters did you use to open your gui, which parameters are present in your bitcoin.conf.

I know recent versions had significant changes when it comes to wallets and rescanning. For example, version 0.17 included a feature to scan the utxo db instead of rescanning, i think HD wallets became default in 0.16 (but they were introduced in 0.13). So even if i knew all the changes in core's code, it would be that easy to give a defenitive answer.

In theory, i guess you could read the code and see why a rescan was triggered in your specific case tough.

But you are right, a wallet.dat should contain keypairs, transactions and metadata (amongst some other data)

Not a real answer to your question i'm afraid...

[HCP]

When you load a "new" (maybe "different" is the better word?) wallet.dat file from what is currently "synced", Bitcoin Core needs to rescan all of the old block data, looking for transactions that relate to the "new" set of private keys/addresses that you are now providing in that "new" wallet.dat file.

If the wallet.dat was quite old, it would have needed to go back through quite a bit of blockchain history to check for transactions. In your case, based on the date in the filename, it had to rescan potentially 3+ years worth of blockchain data. It should be a "one time" thing, as long as you continue to use that particular wallet.dat file and keep your node relatively up to date and synced.

Note that "rescan" is NOT redownloading/reparsing blocks (assuming your node is not pruned)... it is just reading the data already stored on disk.

There was also potentially some wallet file "upgrade" going on as there has been some wallet file format updates in previous versions.