Topic: bitcoin qt wallet on USB seems to be reseted - i fear i lost EVERYTHING! (Read 2061 times)

The physical file isn't always overwritten indeed. When you delete something you basically tell your filesystem to mark that spot on the harddrive as free again. The actual data is still there, your filesystem just has no way to reference to it anymore.  That is best case scenario. Recovery programs will be able to recover the files (not the names though, as they were stored in the filesystem) most of the time. If it has been overwritten (eventually you will write to that spot that is marked as "free") there is still a chance, but afaik only with specialized hardware, to recover pieces of the data.

cy bo rg and birdy: i will try both your methods tomorrow! i still haven't lost hope. thanks to both of you and ofcourse to everybody else!

if you know one of your addresses you used than you can search in the recovered files for it the addresses are in the wallet file.
or you can search the pattern: "defaultkey"
then you know its the wallet file.

Hi everybody,I'm new here

Well,in my experience recovered files all have wrong names from the original (like your "rev0043.dat" file).
Thus,if you were lucky and you did recover the file you need,just COPY&BACKUP ALL THOSE RECOVERED FILES, change the names OF THE COPIES into the original name of the file you have lost,and you should just have to try all those ".dat" files until you find the one that works.

Hope this helps  


EDIT : p.s. : if you've got some money to spend(for a recovery expert in your city/country),I would like to let you know that you can totally revert the state of clusters so to be able to see the changes in your hard drive since it started operating...By this I mean you can even recover you ex-ex-ex-ex-gf pictures you deleted 3 years ago; in fact,there's no such thing as "deletion" when playing with hard disks (unless you use some special algorithm which scrambles data before deletion).

hi birdy

could it be this by any chance?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2126091

I think I've read something mentioned about scanning the whole volume for possible private keys. Don't know where though :/
But a program like this could help you.

i read that it sometimes a file is nit overwritten even if it says so. that just the index of where the file was is overwritten. at least thats what i understood with my limited konowledge. i am reading more to try to understand if this could be the case.
if i load a copy of the wallet i get an error code, saying that the wallet is damaged and can not be read.

hi knecke

i did, thanks anyway! thats the program i used to recover whatever was left to recover.

maybe you can try this: http://www.chip.de/downloads/Recuva_23935261.html

That sucks man.

I would avoid using Windows for now and use a Live CD to start recovery software. If you're on a regular HDD there's a good chance that the part that contained the wallet.dat isn't physically overwritten yet. It might still be there, your filesystem just doesn't know about it anymore.

Did you keep a copy of the "messed up" wallet.dat? What happens when you load it (a copy of it!), does it have a completely different address?

Ok so it's windows 8 without VSC. Did you enable the file history feature by any chance? This link will explain how to check that http://www.howtogeek.com/74623/how-to-use-the-new-file-history-feature-in-windows-8/

i am using windows 8, unfortunately. there's no shadow copies and things like that. the other thing is that it took me 1.5 weeks before i discovered something was wrong, that's why most of the data has already been overwritten.
i tried like 10 different recovery programs, they all came up with the same result.

however, i found other fileswuth names like "rev0043.dat". out of those approx. 50 files i was able to recover about 7. i am holding on to these hoping they might be good for something. but the wallet.dat definately seems to be f-up..

hi maz. thanks a lot, will do!
i am truly amazed how people take time out of their busy schedule to help me. that's why i belived (and still believe) in the BTC system in the first place.
sure, i also invested bevause i wanted to have the opportunity to help my loved ones later when they are worth a lot. i was planning in giving one BTC to each of my familiy members. i live in a wealthy country but still,parts of my family have suffered hard. my uncle died last year with just 50yrs from a brain tumour and left his family nothing, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time (right after her brother, my uncle) died and so on. i just wanted to make all our lives a little bit easier.
the fact that this opportunity might has vanished hurts me more than lossing a couple of thousand dollars of the current value. knowing that i won't be able to buy back in..

i am not saving anything on my pc at the moment, nor downloading anything in order to not cause any more damage. and i am reading everything there is about recovery. i haven't abandoned hope yet, even tough it is not easy. but i guess it's worth to fight for my original cause of helping my family i guess.

sorry for being a bit emotional here guys, just needed to get that off my chest. again, you are all very helpful and i appreciate it a lot!

exactly. that's why i downloaded it. but i was too stupid to read into other stuff as well. so i have to take the biggst part of the blame.
i was thinking about creating a paper wallet but i didn't because i was to busy to read into it. if only i could turn back time....

thanks man. unfortunately shadow copies are not an option. because i use windows 8 and guess what- no shadow copies in windows 8. vista, XP and windows 7 used them but no, windows 8 doesn't

so sad to hear this. hope you can recover it. good luck!

I have used recovery programs before and they work. I am not sure what O/S he is using, but even if he copied over the wallet.dat file in the appdata folder, it can still be recovered. Easy Data Drive Recovery is what I used. I could walk the OP through it on a conference call. Another poster was absolutely right - avoid using that drive - if the file has been deleted than that block is open to be written on.

Some of you are very cruel.

That is truely a sad story to read.

And I have to agree, unless you're techsavy the bitcoin-qt wallet isn't the best one to use. On the other hand: Bitcoin-qt has a "secure wallet" function one should use to save his wallet to a USB drive. After encrypting it of course. The rationale is: encryption protects from theft (if your password is strong [the longer the better, use letters, numbers AND ]) and the securing on a USB drive protects you from data loss.

I can't provide any help to the case beyond what was said already: Don't do anything more with that harddisk, the more writing is done on it the worse the chances of succesfully recovering that lost data. Use unix-livecds to boot and try recovery from there, I can't suggest any good ones though since I havent' had to use such techniques in years. Trust me you learn quickly from such incidents. If that doesn't work there's allways the option to send it in to recovery labs but those take shitloads of money, probably more than the 30 coins are worth.

Standard client?  What international standards organization has announced a standardized client?  ISO?  IEEE?

As far as I know there is no "standard" or "official" client.

Bitcoin-Qt is the first client created, and it is generally used as a protocol reference.

Calling it "standard" or "official" simply perpetuates the cycle of confusing others.