How do I load a backed up wallet to a another wallet?

[Melswildcat]

Hello, Its a little confusing but try to follow along,
I bought bitcoins in 2014 and watched them go up in value and then down again. I backed up my wallet on a flash drive for safe keeping and wrote down the passwords. I ignored Bitcoin completely until Dec. 2016. Life just got real busy.
Now i'm ready to sell the bitcoins. Sadly my laptop with my original wallet is gone. So I loaded a new wallet on my current laptop. I took about 2 weeks to load the entire block chain. So I have a really nice wallet that is empty.
I've tried to load the data from the flash drive into my new wallet without any luck.

Does anyone know how I can access my saved wallet? There is no "copy/paste" option. Do I need a different wallet?
Is this a common problem when trying to load old saved wallets?

Thanks, Mel.

[OgNasty]

Hello, Its a little confusing but try to follow along,
I bought bitcoins in 2014 and watched them go up in value and then down again. I backed up my wallet on a flash drive for safe keeping and wrote down the passwords. I ignored Bitcoin completely until Dec. 2016. Life just got real busy.
Now i'm ready to sell the bitcoins. Sadly my laptop with my original wallet is gone. So I loaded a new wallet on my current laptop. I took about 2 weeks to load the entire block chain. So I have a really nice wallet that is empty.
I've tried to load the data from the flash drive into my new wallet without any luck.

Does anyone know how I can access my saved wallet? There is no "copy/paste" option. Do I need a different wallet?
Is this a common problem when trying to load old saved wallets?

Thanks, Mel.

Just swap the wallet.dat from your flash drive with the wallet.dat file on your computer.

[Melswildcat]

Sorry if this sounds stupid, what do mean swap the wallet.dat?
Can you walk me through it step by step?

[Rmcdermott927]

Sorry if this sounds stupid, what do mean swap the wallet.dat?
Can you walk me through it step by step?

If you are using Windows it will be in %appdata% but it is your wallet file that contains your private keys. You just copy it into the same folder on your other computer.

[defcon23]

in fact, to correctly answer your question, you need first to provide more info on wich wallet you actually used.

depending if you use electrum, bitcoin core, or another one, it could exist some different way to backup it.

Apparently, as you talked about "downloading the entire blockchain" on your post, I supposed you should use bitcoin core or bitcoin classic.

in this case, depending on your operating system, the "wallet.dat" file wich need to be backup could be found in differents locations.

if it's on Linux: it's based in home folder:

ctrl+h to make appears the hidden files, then.bitcoin


if you're in windows, it's in AppData/bitcoin. ( AppData is also an hidden file )

[mjglqw]

Did you backup the private keys? Probably it would be easier for you that way.

[Decoded]

We need more information. Probably you used Bitcoin core, since you know how to properly sync your wallet.

First - How did you back up your Bitcoin wallet? What files did you put into the USB? To reclaim your wallet, you only need one file that holds all your private keys, which is labelled wallet.dat.

To find this file, it would have been in your old laptop's roaming file, which could be accessed through going to %appdata% on your computer. See if you can remember if you did this or not. If you didn't, you may be out of luck, and may have backed up the wrong wallet.