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.

What is a Bitcoin wallet?

A Bitcoin Wallet is a file that has your private key encrypted so that you can transfer the bitcoin to someone else. There is several type of bitcoin wallets of which can look and behave differrently. Most newer bitcoin wallets have a 12 word recovery key which is able to generate several bitcoin addresses. Some older wallets used to only have one bitcoin address, like the old Multibit Classic .key files or Blockchain.info wallet.aes.json files

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

If you had a Bitcoin Core wallet, then most likely the wallet name is wallet.dat. Depending if you used or MAC or PC it is saved in different folders. On PC it was automatically saved in Appdata folder which is hidden by default.

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.

Recover Bitcoin Wallet

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

A Schildbach wallet used to end the backup filename with .bin you can find source code HERE
If you have a text file with a string of 240 characters starting with U2 and ending with a = then its an AES encrypted wallet. You should be able to decrypt it with BTC Recover which is for free and can be downloaded from Github.

TREZOR HARDWARE WALLET

A Trezor hardware wallet was one of the first to allow self storage of Bitcoin. The backup seed was usually 12 or 24 words, with sometimes an additional secret word, also called PASSPHRASE.
There are many different Trezor hardware wallets today but the most widely used is the TREZOR ONE. Visit TREZOR.IO to read more or check their discussion board at 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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