Despite all I've learn after the two years I've been studying bitcoins and experimenting with my local client and dabbling with some mining, I think I just managed to do one of the stooooooopidist things one can do.... I lost my wallet.dat. But I didn't just 'lose it'... it took many days of planning to fuck up this royally.
So I'll try to make this as brief as possible, not just simply to explain what I did, but also with the dim hope their might be some angle I've missed that someone might be able to point out that might recover my lost data; I'm at a total loss.... but as brief as I may try to be, there are several premises I must try to lay out in order to explain my conclusion.
So in the last few months, I'd figured out how to install my bitcoin client on an encrypted usb drive and get it to run on most any computer. Always experimenting and changing things up, I've also been playing with ubuntu distros on a laptop I acquired recently - choosing to install them alongside windows instead of partitioning the disk manually. The last one I tried was 12.10 with KDE – which sucked and I hated it, but I didn't figure that out for several weeks of growing frustration.
At some point, I copied the bitcoin client in its entirety to the hard drive using the ubuntu drive – most likely intending to simply back it up; but then for shits and giggles, I ran the client from the hard-drive and used it to create several addresses. I bet some of you already know where this is going.
The copy on the usb still worked as well, so I left it plugged into my desktop running and watched as the transactions I carried out on the laptop showed up on the other client, only as parenthetical, light gray font transactions instead of bold, saved address ones. Even though it was less than two weeks, I used both clients several times, trusting the blockchains to figure out my addresses were valid.
Eventually, I come to realize how much 12.10kde is bumming me out and burning up the laptop (like literally...the damn thing started overheating on it, but not on windows), so I began transferring my data off the drive to my cloud back up, etc. and preparing to delete that distro and move on to Mint. But, ultimately no, for some reason, the .bitcoin folder did not backup correctly (maybe the connection faltered and stopped the upload?), and to compound the oversight, previously, when I thought I was copying over the correct wallet.dat file from my encrypted backup to my usb client, it turns out, it was an older copy and not the latest one from the laptop.
Moving on, 12.10kde is gone and purged and has been replaced, the bitcoin client as it was gone with it. Today, after much consideration and anxiously watching the price tick upward day-by-day and remembering that there was a pretty major hack the last time btc prices were at an all time high, I decided to move the bitcoins sitting in Mtgox to my local 'safe' client.
I pulled up my transaction history on the desktop with the usb client running, logged onto mtgox and copied and pasted the address I used the last time I withdrew from mtgox, last week, and executed my transaction. And I waited.
Sigh. It turns out, the transaction history saved the address from the other client, but that doesn't mean its part of the local wallet.dat. I sent the btc to an address that only existed on the client on the laptop and the back up I'd copied into my usb client was more than a week old.
So now I'm sitting here staring at
http://blockchain.info/address/1KFRAh1ArY3qxVLTfFvjWyFFiTBVcyVA6 and trying to be thankful it wasn't anymore, but really dreading watching the price keep going up.
Anyone have any suggestion I haven't thought of by chance? Thanks for reading. Learn from me.
