These storage units of cryptocurrency come in different forms and they vary depending on the device. Bitcoin wallets store private keys to unlock the address and allow you to spend your personal stash of cryptocurrency. There’s a misconception that the wallet itself is stored on your hard drive. Instead, your pin or private key to unlock your cryptocurrency is what you’ll want to protect and what you’ll need to recover if it’s lost in a hard drive crash.
How to Recover your Bitcoin Wallet
To recover a lost Bitcoin wallet, you’ll want to look for a file with a name like wallet.dat. Depending on your provider, your wallet might have a slightly different name, like multbit.wallet. If you’re having trouble finding the file on your own, try a trusted recovery software like Secure Recovery for Windows. If you’d rather entrust a professional or have already tried DIY data recovery, consider forensic data recovery to get back you lost access to cryptocurrency. Professional data recovery can be expensive because specialized knowledge, extensive time, clean room technology is required. Still, many people find the investment in recovery well worth the recovery of money lost within a Bitcoin wallet. Avoid any physical DIY methods of recovery because you can further damage your hard drive and render recovery impossible. A partial recovery of data is usually better than losing everything. A partial recovery of a wallet file, however, is worthless.
What Next
Once you’ve recovered your Bitcoin wallet, don’t lose it again. Consider updating your storage system to NAS with RAID. The cost of this small upgrade is minimal compared to forensics data recovery. There are several options to backup your wallet in the cloud. While its convenience is temping, make sure that your wallet is encrypted before storing it on a cloud platform. Storing backups on USB drives is another option to make sure your wallet is stored in at least two places.
If you’ve lost access to your Bitcoin wallet due to hard drive failure, submit an online form. Our techs will be in touch to get recovery started.