BitPay – formerly known as Copay – is a well-known crypto wallet that was especially popular in the mid-2010s. BitPay is mainly built for mobile devices, with apps for both iPhone and Android, though versions for Windows and Mac do exist.
If you used BitPay years ago to store your cryptocurrencies, you might have forgotten where the wallet files are saved on your phone or computer. In that situation, the best way to track them down is to scan your devices with an application called Treasure Hunter. You can also search for the files yourself, but as you will see, the manual route is far less reliable.
How to automatically scan your computer for BitPay and Copay wallets
The most dependable way to find a BitPay or Copay wallet is to use software built for this job. Treasure Hunter inspects the contents of every file on your computer to determine whether it holds cryptocurrency data. It recognizes the Chromium database fragments and the JSON backup files left behind by this wallet software. Thanks to its advanced detection techniques, it can uncover wallets even if they have been renamed, hidden, buried in an archive, or partially corrupted. Moreover:
- It works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- It scans all kinds of storage media – hard drives, SSDs, USB keys, SD cards, etc.
- It detects wallet files and seed phrases.
- It doesn’t need an Internet connection. It is fully functional offline.
- It lets you scan your drives for free to see if any wallets are found.
The manual way
If you would rather not download any software, you can look for the wallet files yourself. Be aware, however, that this approach is technically difficult for mobile users, and time-consuming and unreliable for desktop users. With hundreds of thousands of files on a computer, it’s easy to walk past the right one, especially if you ever renamed or moved it.
If you used only the BitPay or Copay mobile app, recovering your wallet file manually is very hard. It requires jailbreaking your phone – a complicated and risky process that goes far beyond this guide.
If you used the desktop version, there’s a chance your wallet files are still somewhere on your computer. Using your
operating system’s search function, look for folders named .bitpay or .copay and check inside them for files with
the .log or .ldb extension. It is also worth searching your entire computer for files whose name ends with
-Copaybackup.aes.json or -BitPaybackup.aes.json.
Don’t forget your seed phrase
Whether you were on mobile or desktop, your best chance is to find your seed phrase. When you first created the wallet, you were probably told to write down a 12-word recovery phrase. It might look something like this:
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If you still have this phrase, you’re in luck – you don’t need the old wallet file at all. You can simply import the seed phrase into BitPay or another compatible wallet software to regain access to your funds.
