Electrum seed lost

[Ed801]

Hi I setup a wallet in sept of last year and set my seed aside in a very safe place it seems as I can't find it now. I have my password and can login into my wallet but it was watch only. do I have any options? I've tried looking for it in a text file on my pc but i am not having much luck there ether.

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[BitMaxz]

Without the seed phrase, you can't able to recover your wallet and you can't either recover your wallet if it's a watch-only wallet.

Try to check the Electrum wallet folder and maybe you have another wallet save on that folder and open it with Electrum.


Do you remember the name of the file where did you save the seed phrase?

[BlackHatCoiner]

You can recover your funds by having only one of the followings:

• Seed phrase.
• Back up of wallet file, or any other text file, that isn't watch-only and contains the private keys.

If you don't have one of these, you can't recover your bitcoins. You essentially need access to your private keys and with the seed phrase you can derive them. The watch-only wallet you mentioned is as said by its name, only for watching your balance.

I've tried looking for it in a text file on my pc but i am not having much luck there ether.

Did you save your private keys or your seed phrase on a txt file?

[Charles-Tim]

It is very easy to generate a wallet that can spend than to generate a watch-only wallet. I mean before you can generate a watch-only wallet, you would have generated wallet with seed phrase.

Did you still have a cold wallet for the watch-only wallet that you generated?
Or, did you still have a wallet that you generated the master public key from before importing it to your watch-only?

This is also the wallet that is used for signing anytime you want to make a transaction, do you still have it? If you have it, you can use it to get access to your seed phrase.

[bob123]

You might want to check whether you have another wallet file on your PC which isn't watch-only.
Other than that.. if you don't have any backup of your wallet file, mnemonic code or your master private key you are out of luck unfortunately.

Do you remember creating a watch-only wallet? Do you also remember deleting your actual wallet file containing the private keys?

[bitbollo]

well, there is not much you can do at this point. without seed or a private key you can't spend coins.
Are you sure you can't access to your seed? I mean it should be a "very safe place!"
Anyone could have access by mistake to this information? (like while cleaning or tidying?) 

[Ed801]

You might want to check whether you have another wallet file on your PC which isn't watch-only.
Other than that.. if you don't have any backup of your wallet file, mnemonic code or your master private key you are out of luck unfortunately.

Do you remember creating a watch-only wallet? Do you also remember deleting your actual wallet file containing the private keys?

 formatted my drive and lost the main wallet, I did export something to a USB key but forget what that was... If i knew what to look for on my usb keys i might be able to find something

[DireWolfM14]

formatted my drive and lost the main wallet, I did export something to a USB key but forget what that was... If i knew what to look for on my usb keys i might be able to find something

Electrum has some default wallet names, the first wallet it creates will be called "default_wallet" and the subsequent wallets will be called "wallet_1", "wallet_2", so on and so forth.  Electrum does not add extensions to the wallet names.  Search for something like that on your USB stick but barring any luck there, you'll need to find that seed phrase.

[Ed801]

formatted my drive and lost the main wallet, I did export something to a USB key but forget what that was... If i knew what to look for on my usb keys i might be able to find something

Electrum has some default wallet names, the first wallet it creates will be called "default_wallet" and the subsequent wallets will be called "wallet_1", "wallet_2", so on and so forth.  Electrum does not add extensions to the wallet names.  Search for something like that on your USB stick but barring any luck there, you'll need to find that seed phrase.

thank you i'll give that a try

[BitMaxz]

 formatted my drive and lost the main wallet, I did export something to a USB key but forget what that was... If i knew what to look for on my usb keys i might be able to find something

If there are no sensitive files from your USB you can make a screenshot and we can try to check which file is your wallet or maybe other files that you backup from Electrum.

[Ed801]

 formatted my drive and lost the main wallet, I did export something to a USB key but forget what that was... If i knew what to look for on my usb keys i might be able to find something

If there are no sensitive files from your USB you can make a screenshot and we can try to check which file is your wallet or maybe other files that you backup from Electrum.

Unfortunately its full of correspondence and paystubs and other personal stuff, I found nothing on my pc or the drives entitled wallet unfortunately to

[DireWolfM14]

You may have named the file something other than "wallet."  It may be worth taking the time to search for "bitcoin" or "crypto" or "electrum" or anything else that you may have named the file but since forgot.  But that seems like a longshot at this point, I think you need focus on finding that seed.  If someone else finds it before you do they can steal you coins.

I probably don't need to say this, but I would advise against sharing any personal information with anyone here.  Be especially wary of anyone who sends you personal message offering to help, odds are they're trying to scam you.

[Eddy Devon]

Or, check the usb stick for files dated around Sept-Oct 2020?
Tim

[BitMaxz]

Unfortunately its full of correspondence and paystubs and other personal stuff, I found nothing on my pc or the drives entitled wallet unfortunately to

Usually, the Electrum wallet file doesn't have an extension so try to collect all files without extension but you need to enable the extension on folder option so that you can see all files with or without extension.

Once you've collected them all make a copy and put it in the other folder now try to open the copy files with Electrum one by one and maybe one of them is your Electrum wallet if you are lucky.

[khaled0111]

I did export something to a USB key but forget what that was... If i knew what to look for on my usb keys i might be able to find something

If you have created a backup of your wallet file and saved it on your USB key, then you should look for any file without extension (wallet_name) or with .backup extension (wallet-name.backup) if you were using a recent version of Electrum.
If you exported your wallet's private keys to your USB key, then you should look for a .CSV (by default) or a .JSON file. The file name is electrum-private-keys by default.
You can also search for the file by its creation date and/or its size. You said you created your wallet on September of last year so you can safely exclude any file which was created before that.

[sheenshane]

This thread is related to your problem and OmegaStarScream shows an image how the wallet.file look likes on this post and possible it should be there in your device had used in downloading Electrum.  Once you will find it, it is easy for you to decrypt your seed phare.

If this will not work, sorry to tell you but there's no other way to recover your wallet, seed phrase is very important in all crypto wallets, if you lost it, there's nothing you can do even how brute force you made it will not work.  I don't think why the only password you have to keep safe not the private key which is the most important than the password.

[DireWolfM14]

~

That thread is about Atomic wallet, this about Electrum.

[Pmalek]

If there is a possibility that your private keys or seed might be digitally stored on a USB, the best thing to do is going through each file trying to figure out what it is. Copy and paste the content from the USB drive to a new folder somewhere on your PC. Delete everything in your copy/pasted folder that you are 100% sure what it is. Photos, personal documents, invoices, whatever. Don't delete stuff that seem unknown by looking at the name or type of file.

When you are done with that, start going through the files that are left and pay attention to the date they were last accessed or modified. Pay attention to the name of the files and the types.

Do you remember ever going into your AppData > Roaming directory (if you are using Windows) and saving your wallet file on that USB?