Electrum is one of the oldest and most popular wallet software that is still used today. It was released in 2011, and unlike the very first wallet software – Bitcoin Core – that was released in 2009, Electrum focuses on speed and simplicity with low resource usage. For instance, it does not need to download the whole blockchain (which currently weighs about 650 GB) to work properly.
Because of Electrum’s popularity, many people have Electrum wallets. Some of them even own wallets from the beginning of the 2010s. If you are among them, you might have bought Bitcoin when it was worth barely anything; and now that it’s worth a lot of money, you want to access your coins to sell them. But how do you do that if you have lost your Bitcoin wallet and are unable to find it? Is it possible to track down your Bitcoins on your computer? The answer is yes!
The manual way
One approach is to look for the Electrum folder on your computer. In it, you should find a folder named wallets,
which should contain your Electrum wallet files.
On Windows, the wallets folder can be found at the following paths:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Electrum\walletsC:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Electrum\wallets
On Mac, the wallets folder can be found at the following path:
/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Electrum/wallets
However, note that your Electrum wallet files might not be stored in the wallets folder. They might be elsewhere on
your computer. If that’s the case, there is no easy way to find them manually, as their filenames don’t necessarily follow
a pattern. You could use your operating system’s search function to search for keywords like wallet or bitcoin,
but even then, you may fail to find your wallet files.
The automatic way
This issue is in part why I have created the software Treasure Hunter. It can scan your computer and find your Electrum wallets, no matter where they are on your computer. If you believe that Electrum wallet files are stored on your computer, but you cannot find them, I highly recommend that you use my software. All you have to do is press a few buttons while the software does the heavy lifting! Treasure Hunter works on Mac, Windows and Linux. It’s free and open-source.