Restoring old backups of wallet.dat

berlin (OP)

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Restoring old backups of wallet.dat

May 21, 2011, 09:24:28 AM

#1

Are there problems with this? Say you backup a wallet.dat, save it somewhere. The next time you run the client it generates for you a new wallet.dat. Months go by, now you wish to spend bitcoins in old wallet.dat. Can there be a problem from this if you merely copy back the old save from months before?

Binford 6100

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Re: Restoring old backups of wallet.dat

May 21, 2011, 09:26:48 AM

#2

just copy back and spend

might be good idea to start the bitcoin client with the -rescan switch
to search for eventual transactions related to the old wallet from the time it was offline
might recalculate available balance to be accurate.

You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.

Pieter Wuille

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Re: Restoring old backups of wallet.dat

May 21, 2011, 09:43:54 AM

#3

Quote from: ptmhd on May 21, 2011, 09:26:48 AM

just copy back and spend

might be good idea to start the bitcoin client with the -rescan switch
to search for eventual transactions related to the old wallet from the time it was offline
might recalculate available balance to be accurate.

This should not be necessary anymore since 0.3.21, since information about the current best chain is stored in wallet.dat, and a rescan of the unknown part is issued when this does not wallet the block chain database. If either the last version to write to wallet.dat, or the version to restore with is older, -rescan is needed.

I do Bitcoin stuff.

berlin (OP)

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Re: Restoring old backups of wallet.dat

May 21, 2011, 10:17:54 AM

#4

Many thanks.

gigabytecoin

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Re: Restoring old backups of wallet.dat

May 21, 2011, 12:11:31 PM

#5

Quote from: Pieter Wuille on May 21, 2011, 09:43:54 AM

Quote from: ptmhd on May 21, 2011, 09:26:48 AM

just copy back and spend

might be good idea to start the bitcoin client with the -rescan switch
to search for eventual transactions related to the old wallet from the time it was offline
might recalculate available balance to be accurate.

This should not be necessary anymore since 0.3.21, since information about the current best chain is stored in wallet.dat, and a rescan of the unknown part is issued when this does not wallet the block chain database. If either the last version to write to wallet.dat, or the version to restore with is older, -rescan is needed.

Thank goodness...!!

I was going to say...

Not many "average" users of the Bitcoin client would know how to add the -rescan command whilst starting the Bitcoin client.