Recover Bitcoin Wallet – how to guide

If you need to Recover Bitcoin Wallet then here is the best guide to examine the different Bitcoin Wallets and their individual characteristics. Many of those wallets are no longer supported and therefor its pretty tricky to know what steps are involved to recover their password and export the private keys to another wallet.

Many Bitcoin owners have a vague memory of owning or buy Bitcoin ten years ago but do not know where to start. Most recovery guides made in the last few year are AI generated with fuzzy logic and incomplete tutorials. This hand written guide will teach you the latest tricks in 2025 how to quickly recover you Bitcoin wallet and export the private keys.

Step 1. Locate your Bitcoin wallet

If you have a vague memory of owning Bitcoin but don’t have a clue where to start you have come to the right place.

The easiest and fastest way to start is to search for the string “bitcoin” in your mail folder. If you ever mined or had a private key mail, most provably the word Bitcoin was included in the text. The next list will show you most common Bitcoin related names or words

Blockchain.info – One of the first online Bitcoin wallets
Wallet.dat – The most common Bitcoin wallet file used by miner software in 2010-2012.
Wallet.aes.json – Wallet filename used by blockchain.info and blockchain.com to store your encrypted private keys
*.key or *.wallet files – file extension from Multibit Classic wallets used by millions
Electrum – The early Bitcoin only wallet from Germany. You could use any filename by by default it was default_wallet
Private Key – A string of 50+ characters starting with 5 or L
Seed words – A word sequence usually 12 words. But many wallets used different word length and in some instances it was 16 19 21 22 25 etc

If any of the above make a hit you are on the right track.

Check if you ever had an account with blockchain.com

If you dont have a clue where you wallet is but might have used an online service back in 2011-2015, then there is a big chance you used blockchain.info
The website has rebranded to blockchain.com and there is a trick to find out if you ever held bitcoin with them.

1. Go to blockchain.com/login
2. Enter your user name (usually your e-mail address)
3. Enter any password, even if its forgotten
4. Check your mail and approve the device

If the password is correct, you will enter the wallet. Make sure to check the DEFI wallet as by default it takes you to the exchange wallet and there is two.

If you ever had an account with them,then an email should arrive within 10 minutes with your wallet ID. If you kept several wallets then they will send you a list of wallet ID in the format XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXX
Don’t worry if you dont remember the password, we have special software to download the encrypted backup and with your password guesses decrypt the file offline.

Was ist eine Bitcoin-Brieftasche?

Ein Bitcoin-Wallet ist eine Datei, in der Ihr privater Schlüssel verschlüsselt ist, so dass Sie Bitcoin an eine andere Person übertragen können. Es gibt verschiedene Arten von Bitcoin-Wallets, die unterschiedlich aussehen und sich unterschiedlich verhalten können. Die meisten neueren Bitcoin-Wallets haben einen 12-Wort-Wiederherstellungsschlüssel, mit dem mehrere Bitcoin-Adressen generiert werden können. Einige ältere Wallets hatten nur eine Bitcoin-Adresse, wie die alten Multibit Classic .key Dateien oder Blockchain.info wallet.aes.json Dateien

The Different Bitcoin Wallet apps

If you are looking for ways to track where your Bitcoin went or where is your wallet, you need first to look at what was the wallet you used. The older the app, the harder to find real and specific information. Below please find the various apps and where they store the password or wallet backup.

BITCOIN CORE Bitcoin Wallet

Hätten Sie einen Bitcoin Core Wallet haben, dann lautet der Name der Wallet höchstwahrscheinlich wallet.dat. Je nachdem, ob Sie einen MAC oder einen PC benutzen, wird sie in verschiedenen Ordnern gespeichert. Auf dem PC wurde sie automatisch im Ordner Appdata gespeichert, der standardmäßig versteckt ist.

A typical Windows Bitcoin Core folder is here:
To access the file from the Terminal go to
C:\Users\keychainx\AppData\Roaming\bitcoin
C – This is the drive
keychainx – this is the user when you login

If you have a newer version of Bitcoin core (i.e. 28 or newer) then the wallet.dat is in the wallets folder.

BEWARE! The AppData folder is hidden, so if you just look inside the username folder, it wont show up. You have to manually enter it in the search field or go to a Terminal Window.

For MACs its here: ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/
For Linux its here: ~/.bitcoin/

MULTIBIT CLASSIC Bitcoin Wallet

Alternatively if you used another wallet called Multibit Classic, then the file names were usually ending with .key or .wallet
Multibit Classic is no longer supported but you can look at Multibit Classic for more information how to load or access the wallet data once you find the file.
The original Multibit Classic used to save the wallets incrementally and they are in a folder called MULTIBIT-DATA. There used to be four different folders inside.
KEY-BACKUP – Where single .key files were saved
ROLLING-BACKUP – Here two file versions were incrementally saved. The .info and .wallet files. The .info you can view with a text editor and see which wallet address was used. The corresponding .wallet file is the encrypted wallet.
WALLET-BACKUP – Is the main folder where you saved or created your first wallet.
WALLET-UNENC-BACKUP – This is an interesting folder. Here you can find both .cipher and .wallet files. If you are lucky, the .wallet file can be decrypted without the password. You would need to use OPENSSL for that.

Bitcoin-Wallet wiederherstellen

A guide to Recover a Bitcoin Wallet Password

ELECTRUM Bitcoin Wallet

An Electrum wallet (Electrum) had a default name simply called default_wallet. Electrum is open source and one of the oldest Bitcoin software wallets. You can check the source code at https://electrum.org/#download
Electrum has it own version of seed words that are not compatible with Trezor or Bitcoin core, so make sure to use the SLIP39 option when recovering a Bitcoin Core wallet inside Electrum.

SCHILDBACH – Recover Bitcoin Wallet

Bei einer Schildbach-Wallet endet der Dateiname des Backups mit .bin. Den Quellcode finden Sie HIER
Wenn Sie eine Textdatei mit einer Zeichenfolge von 240 Zeichen haben, die mit U2 beginnt und mit einem = endet, handelt es sich um eine AES-verschlüsselte Wallet. Sie sollten in der Lage sein, es mit BTC Recover zu entschlüsseln, das kostenlos ist und von Github heruntergeladen werden kann.

TREZOR HARDWARE WALLET

Eine Trezor-Hardware-Wallet war eine der ersten, die die Selbstspeicherung von Bitcoin ermöglichte. Der Backup-Seed bestand in der Regel aus 12 oder 24 Wörtern, manchmal mit einem zusätzlichen Geheimwort, auch PASSPHRASE genannt.
Es gibt heute viele verschiedene Trezor-Hardware-Wallets, aber die am weitesten verbreitete ist die TREZOR ONE. Besuchen Sie TREZOR.IO, um mehr zu erfahren, oder besuchen Sie das Diskussionsforum unter https://forum.trezor.io/

To Recover Bitcoin a Wallet, what other options do I have?

You could always contact a reputable Wallet Recovery Service like KeychainX. You can send us an email to keychainx@protonmail.com

If you are an advanced user you can use a tool called pywallet. Pywallet is able to scan your entire disk and look for private keys or wallet files.
You can find the original pywallet here: https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet

Recover Bitcoin Wallet – Final thoughts

Its not always easy to be on your own trying to recover your Bitcoin. And its also stressful to trust someone else with your encrypted wallet. Dont hesitate to contact us if you want to chat wallet recovery or ask us questions. If you need help recovering your Bitcoin Wallet contacts us through keychainx@protonmail.com or you can also try Telegram using our @keychainx tag.

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