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 best way to do it is to scan your computer with an application called Treasure Hunter.
How to automatically scan your computer for Electrum wallets
The most reliable way to find an Electrum wallet file is to use software built for this job. This is why I created Treasure Hunter: it inspects the contents of every file on your computer to determine whether it is an Electrum wallet. Thanks to its advanced detection techniques, it finds your wallets no matter where they sit on your drive, even if they have been renamed, buried in an archive, or partially corrupted.
All you have to do is press a few buttons while the software does the heavy lifting. Treasure Hunter works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it’s free!
The manual way
If you would rather not download any software, you can search for your Electrum wallet files yourself. 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, and 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 look for keywords like wallet or bitcoin, but even then,
you may walk away empty-handed from a computer that does hold a wallet.
