Wallet.dat missing?

[flytosky]

Restarted my wallet, and suddenly poof. Wallet is redownloading blockchain, and old wallet.dat is missing. How to recover?

[xypos]

How did you lose it actually?
I don't think that it will be possible to recover it if you had no backup

[flytosky]

Wallet is not hacked, opened the wallet and it started downloading blockchain old wallet.dat was gone.

[DannyHamilton]

Do you have a backup from before it happened?

[ibminer]

Wallet is not hacked, opened the wallet and it started downloading blockchain old wallet.dat was gone.

What OS?  

[flytosky]

No backup, windows.

[ibminer]

No backup, windows.

It really depends on how these files disappeared, but you could attempt to use undelete utilities to recover the files... there used to be a few free ones out there, I haven't used one in a while.

Have you looked directly at the location that the client keeps the wallet.dat?
if Vista/7/8, I believe this is C:\Users\YourUserName\Appdata\Roaming\BitCoin
Curious what files/folders are in there right now...

I've never had the client touch the wallet.dat file before, amongst many different corruptions of the blockchain and full re-downloads, so I would be surprised if it was the Bitcoin client itself that removed the wallet.dat... what version are you using?

[flytosky]

No backup, windows.

It really depends on how these files disappeared, but you could attempt to use undelete utilities to recover the files... there used to be a few free ones out there, I haven't used one in a while.

Have you looked directly at the location that the client keeps the wallet.dat?
if Vista/7/8, I believe this is C:\Users\YourUserName\Appdata\Roaming\BitCoin
Curious what files/folders are in there right now...

I've never had the client touch the wallet.dat file before, amongst many different corruptions of the blockchain and full re-downloads, so I would be surprised if it was the Bitcoin client itself that removed the wallet.dat... what version are you using?

C:\Users\YourUserName\Appdata\Roaming\BitCoin has the new wallet, old wallet was deleted following full re-download.

[ibminer]

'Recuva' was a program I have used in the past, and appears to still be free on first look. You could give this a try and have it attempt to recover from the specific location of the wallet.dat

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download

[flytosky]

'Recuva' was a program I have used in the past, and appears to still be free on first look. You could give this a try and have it attempt to recover from the specific location of the wallet.dat

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download

Other methods?

[flytosky]

Bitcoins are gone for good?

[spazzdla]

Bitcoins are gone for good?

... You really should back up your wallet ASAP and 100% should before sending BTC to it..

If a recovery tool can't find the file, you didn't back it up and you didn't write down your private/public keys.. things are very bad.

[flytosky]

Help appreciated

[silverfuture]

If you didn't back the wallet.dat up before funding it, the only help we can give is to make sure you do that next time. Sorry for your loss.

[Injust]

'Recuva' was a program I have used in the past, and appears to still be free on first look. You could give this a try and have it attempt to recover from the specific location of the wallet.dat

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download

Just for information here, Recuva and other file recovery utilities find "deleted" files on your disk because they are marked as "free space" by Windows, but until they are overwritten, they can still be recovered.
If you accidentally delete any file, what you should do is immediately shut down your computer so no more hard drive writing is done, so there is a lesser chance that the sector(s) where the file resides on gets overwritten.

[davidpbrown]

Perhaps on first run, the Bitcoin client should warn users to make a wallet backup immediately and then also after sending bitcoins too. I wonder it would be worth even having it spawn many backups, whenever it generates new addresses from loose change.

OP's not been clear exactly but perhaps overwrote the client by unzipping a fresh version to the same place. User error, replace user and press any key to continue.

[flytosky]

'Recuva' was a program I have used in the past, and appears to still be free on first look. You could give this a try and have it attempt to recover from the specific location of the wallet.dat

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download

Just for information here, Recuva and other file recovery utilities find "deleted" files on your disk because they are marked as "free space" by Windows, but until they are overwritten, they can still be recovered.
If you accidentally delete any file, what you should do is immediately shut down your computer so no more hard drive writing is done, so there is a lesser chance that the sector(s) where the file resides on gets overwritten.

Bitcoin software deleted wallet.dat, I launched bitcoin wallet, and noticed blockchain re-download. BTC was missing.

[Lauda]

You should always make a backup of the wallet.

[WindMaster]

Bitcoin software deleted wallet.dat, I launched bitcoin wallet, and noticed blockchain re-download. BTC was missing.

Not likely, there isn't any code in the Bitcoin client that ever deletes wallet.dat.  Since your client also started redownloading the blockchain, it means something else nuked your Bitcoin data directory altogether (blockchain data and wallet.dat and all).  Or else you're logged in as a different user in Windows.  Searching your whole hard drive for files named wallet.dat doesn't turn anything up?

[Injust]

Perhaps on first run, the Bitcoin client should warn users to make a wallet backup immediately and then also after sending bitcoins too. I wonder it would be worth even having it spawn many backups, whenever it generates new addresses from loose change.

OP's not been clear exactly but perhaps overwrote the client by unzipping a fresh version to the same place. User error, replace user and press any key to continue.

I think that it's almost impossible that OP overwrote it with a fresh Bitcoin client version because the Bitcoin zipped files do NOT contain a wallet.dat file, or anything but the program files as far as I know.