I just have found a wallet which I used back in the day to receive BTC from faucets. That was long ago. It was on my old hard drive which was a lost one for me but luckily I discovered the drive yesterday.
What's the fastest way to check the balance on my wallet? There's a folder inside which contains wallet.dat file. How can I recover the fund? I can't wait to see the balance.
Simply download the latest version of Bitcoin Core, copy your wallet.dat to the
data directory and let it sync for a while.
Its simpler and safer than other methods. That's if you won't mind the bandwidth and disk space (
about 300GB).
Another "
non-easy option" is to export the keys and import them to Electrum.
That requires you to do some commands and manual/scripted editing to get the keys or addresses (
depending on what you need).
Here's a short non-detailed guide:
- After importing the wallet to Bitcoin Core (even offline/not-synced), go to console and use dumpwallet command.
- Open the dump wallet file using a txt editor and check each addresses on a blockexplorer if any of them have balance.
- Then import the private key(s) that's next to the address(es) to Electrum using "Import bitcoin addresses or private keys" option to spend the balance.
- Alternatively, just import all private keys to Electrum to be able check the balances and spend them.
And oh, BTW, you need to remember the wallet's passphrase or it will just be a tease.
-edit: removed dumpprivkey since the dumpwallet already has the private keys-
