Wasabi Wallet is a popular, privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet, well-known for its CoinJoin implementation. Many people have used it to store and manage their Bitcoins over the years. If you are one of them, an old wallet file may still be sitting somewhere on your computer, in a folder you have long since forgotten.
Now that you want to access your coins, how do you track that file down? The best way is to scan your computer with an application called Treasure Hunter. I will also cover a manual method later on.
How to automatically scan your computer for Wasabi Wallet files
The most reliable way to find a Wasabi Wallet file is to use software built for this job. Treasure Hunter inspects the contents of every file on your computer to determine whether it holds Wasabi Wallet data. Thanks to its advanced detection techniques, it can recognize wallet files even if they have been renamed, buried in an archive, or partially corrupted.
It also works on a wide variety of storage devices, including hard drives (HDDs and SSDs), USB keys and SD cards, as well as optical media like CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and you can scan your devices for free.
The manual way
If you would rather not download any software, you can look for your Wasabi Wallet files yourself. Just be aware that a manual search is much more time-consuming and error-prone, and you may walk away empty-handed from a computer that does hold a wallet.
Wasabi Wallet stores its wallet data in a JSON file. While this file could technically be located anywhere on your
computer, it is usually found within the Wallets folder inside the Wasabi Wallet data directory.
On Windows, you should check the following paths:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\WalletWasabi\Client\WalletsC:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\WalletWasabi\Client\Wallets
On Mac, you should look in this folder:
/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/WalletWasabi/Client/Wallets
The contents of your JSON file will vary depending on the wallet version. For instance, a file created by a very old version of Wasabi Wallet might look like this:
1{
2 "EncryptedSecret": "6PYKccJMaxLz9wpGSx1ZdVi1bTHD446KW7ewXKmmLx1GWpxZB8iJ9Jj2SE",
3 "ChainCode": "/xEg8eBSv7om2wMBxDOtHlK7ak63xcXL2t2WZiQY1sI=",
4 "ExtPubKey": "03BAFB469580000000BE542E25DDFD3E1C1F24C12BAA56C0B5082E6265B58BCFCEF75E32DD996ABC720336775E2B832E27B964C8021A8AACB432399D6889CEF72918761DB13507A3A88C",
5 "HdPubKeys": []
6}
A more recent wallet file is significantly larger and more complex. It may contain lines similar to the ones above, along with many additional entries and data fields.
If your wallet file isn’t in the locations listed above, the manual search becomes more difficult. Your computer could
hold thousands of .json files, and yours might not have an obvious name. You can still try searching for files whose
name contains the word wallet and ends with .json, but this approach will almost certainly fail if you took steps
to hide your wallet, for instance by renaming the file to something inconspicuous.
What to do if you find a Wasabi wallet file
Before you do anything else, make a copy of the wallet file you found and store it somewhere safe. Never experiment with the original file, as it may be silently upgraded, re-encrypted, or overwritten by certain wallet software. A single botched attempt can destroy the file for good. Once this is done, you can attempt to open your copy of the wallet file with Wasabi Wallet.
