I discovered I have my 2013 wallet.dat file but the file is encrypted

[bitcoinermatt]

I was surfing trough my external hard drive files and found my old wallet.dat file. I currently have a full node on my PC, is it okay if I overwrite the old wallet.dat file with the new one? Will this screw everything up? The wallet.dat is surely encrypted though, I will be giving updates on the thread.

Thanks

[bL4nkcode]

I currently have a full node on my PC, is it okay if I overwrite the old wallet.dat file with the new one? Will this screw everything up? The wallet.dat is surely encrypted though, I will be giving updates on the thread.

If the existing .dat file is important to you, you can make a copy of it and paste/save it into a specific folder then try to recover the encrypted file in the future.

But if you don't care then you can proceed without having a backup. And afaik overwriting .dat files will not affect the wallet/client, it's just your wallets will be replaced.

[NotATether]

If the wallet is encrypted that means there has to be a password to it.

Do you remember the password to the 2013 wallet.dat? If you don't, I wouldn't recommend overwriting a wallet file you can already access with one you don't even know the password to and thus can not access - especially if your other wallet has funds in it.

[bitcoinermatt]

I was able to find the password of the wallet and I was extremely lucky! I found out I had around .5 BTC in the wallet!

[NotFuzzyWarm]

I was able to find the password of the wallet and I was extremely lucky! I found out I had around .5 BTC in the wallet!

Sweet!
Nice find and rather handy around this time of year...

[bob123]

I currently have a full node on my PC, is it okay if I overwrite the old wallet.dat file with the new one? Will this screw everything up? The wallet.dat is surely encrypted though

Never ever just overwrite a wallet file.
Always make a backup (or better: multiple).

You never know whether you might have made a mistake. You really don't want to lose coins this way.

Having a copy and renaming the wallet file instead of overwriting it is almost fool proof and definitely recommendable.