Bitcoin wallet.dat Data Recovery

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
So I'm trying to do some pre-emptive investigation toward being able to recover bitcoin wallet files. Specifically from the bitcoin core program that was used by the early bitcoin miners. It's not looking terribly difficult to write a custom xml for R-Studio to scan for them, but I'm not certain if some of the header information may be region & or machine specific and might vary from install to install.

Is anyone out there with some sample wallet.dat files I could use for cross-analysis with what I already have?

Just empty wallets (preferable older ones from earlier versions of the program than the latest version) is fine, but if you wish to leave some coin in there for me that's fine too. :lol:

I'm just hoping to have an xml that's as universally accurate as possible.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
So far, I'm finding that the opening signature is pretty standard even across several versions. I am finding that the end has no clear signature though and the size can vary depending on the version of Bitcoin core as well as how many actual addresses you have in the wallet. So it may take some manual work each time to properly truncate the file's end, but that's not the worst thing given that it's generally only going to be one file to recover with each case.
 

Joep

Member
Did you ever get anywhere with this?

Do you have any idea if I can define multiple signatures? Is this what OR is for? Would this work?

wallets.png
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Nice work! I had started into this but never had the time to finish. Glad you took up the project. :D
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
thanks for the spam.
I deleted the post. Funny how completely unrelated the linked spam article was to this thread. They can't possibly expect any SEO benefit from that sort of troll posting.
 
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