Bitcoins gone from Electrum wallet

I added 280 USD worth of Bitcoin into my electrum wallet in TAILS the other day after sending it through a tumbler.

I keep my electrum.dat on an encrypted USB and load it whenever I boot Electrum in Tails.

After I deposited the coins in the account the other day, I closed electrum and Tails without saving another copy of the wallet, I assumed that if I booted from the same original electrum.dat each time, my balance would be the same since it is the same account.

After booting from the original electrum.dat today, I saw that I had no money in the wallet and started to freak out. Even though I opened Electrum through a terminal and entered the command to connect it to the Internet, it still says not connected in the bottom left corner of Electrum, and I am hoping this is the issue.

Have I lost all the Bitcoin I deposited in the wallet since I did not save it? The electrum.dat I use to boot has the same seed and passwords, I assumed it would keep the account balance after connecting to the Internet.

Did I fuck up big? Is there anyway to get these coins back? I have the address that I sent them to originally, I could probably look up the transaction.

Not all of the money was mine, and I have no spare money to pay these people back if these BTC are truly gone.

EDIT: YES I FOUND THE MONEY. I think the issue was that the electrum client was not connected to the Internet (I don't think), so it wasn't registering the transaction I made in the past.

What I did was restart virtualbox, re-download electrum, and instead of using the electrum.dat file like I did before, I left the -w part of the command off when I entered it in the terminal, which caused it to think I was creating a new wallet. From there I used my seed (thank the lawd I wrote it down) to recover the wallet, and for some reason it connected to the Internet this time unlike before.

I'm not going to delete this post, just so if anybody else has this issue in the future they can refer back to here.

BACK UP YOUR GODDAMN .DAT FILE, DON'T MAKE MY MISTAKE


Comments


[2 Points] Tastingtrees:

I don't know much about electrum, but the fact that you didn't save is most likely your problem.


[2 Points] BankofQuark:

Very good information. I'm glad you posted this. Bitcoin security is an often misunderstood process. Sometimes people even secure BTC from themselves.

Last year, the cleaning lady threw away $5000 worth of BTC. I created a btc address and private key offline. I wrote this information down on some scratch paper and left it beside my computer. I moved some coin to the address and went to eat. The coin is still at the address, but the private key is gone forever.