Ether Keystore Recovery

zachkylar

I am relatively inexperienced working with ether, and have enjoyed watching the currency grow. After not having synced for awhile, I was having problems connecting to the node. I figured that I might be able to do this with a fresh install. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted my keystore, which I didn't realize the significance of until I tried to access my accounts. I was able to recover my empty account key through a hdd file recovery program, but the key to my account holding ether was overwritten by the fresh install of mist. I realize that there's probably no coming back from this, but any tips would be greatly appreciated. If nothing to be done, let my loss show the importance of understanding the fundamentals of ether and creating backups!

Thanks,

Zach

RedHouse

zachkylar said:

I realize that there's probably no coming back from this, but any tips would be greatly appreciated. If nothing to be done, let my loss show the importance of understanding the fundamentals of ether and creating backups!

I think most of us do not. Heck, what do you have to back up and where?

The very first thing a wallet should have is a BIG button to do a backup and it should be a requirement when the wallet is created perhaps. I was using parity and in a confusion, sent some eth to an account in it that I never intended to use, do not know where it came from, and have no password for. Fortunately, it was a small amount. I do not use parity or mist anymore.

FireAndTheVoid

Sorry, without the keystore file there is nothing you can do to recover your ether. Even if you know your address (public key) and your password, without the keystore file, there is no way to recover your private key (which is required to unlock the account, sign transactions, etc).

If you've lost a significant amount of ether, you may want to look into a data recovery service. My understanding is that deleted data on a drive is not truly deleted. When drives containing sensitive data are wiped, they usually overwrite the entire drive multiple times to ensure that no data can be recovered.

Good luck.