Update: I recovered the wallet soon after asking the question here, but I don’t remember how.
Background
Some years ago (2017) I must have found a way to ‘serialise’ my wallet, because I stored the following in my password manager:
- Name: “Bitcoin wallet”
- Password: (typical generated password)
- Generation seed: (BIP39 mnemonic)
- Receiving address: (typical bitcoin address)
- Notes: (looks like base64 data, about 3000 characters in length)
I vaguely remember having the Bitcoin-Qt client installed.
Question
What method did I use to serialise (or export, or back-up) my wallet in 2017?
Extra information
What I tried so far:
- Copied the data to text file
- Ran bitcoin-cli importwallet “/path/to/file.txt” (via Bitcoin-Qt’s console). Got the error “Only legacy wallets are supported by this command (code -4)”.
- Decoded the text file using
cat /path/to/file.txt > base64 -d > /path/to/file.datand ran bitcoin-cli importwallet “/path/to/file.dat”. Got the error “Only legacy wallets are supported by this command (code -4)”. - In Bitcoin-Qt selected File, Restore Wallet…, and selected the .dat file. Got “Wallet file verification failed. Failed to load database path ‘~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/wallets/Test’. Data is not in recognized format.”
- Ran
file /path/to/file.datand gotfile.dat: data(I was hoping it would be identified as Berkeley DB, since I read here that wallet.dat files are BerkeleyDB database files). - Checked the links in the answer to this question about the ‘wallet export’ format, but it looks like that is just a way to encode a private key, which would not result in the kind of data I have stored in my password manager.
What I did not do yet:
- Install the version of Bitcoin-Qt current in 2017, and attempt to restore the .dat file.
