Created anchor wallet, lost my private keys, formatted my comp - any options?

Greymass Anchor Wallet
#1

I imported my EOS keys into an anchor wallet, lost the keys and had to format my pc after saving all the files.

I don’t see any sort of wallet import using anchor files(version 1.1.11), nor do I see any anchor files that might have backed up my wallet.

I still have access to the eth wallet that was used during eos genesis, but I can’t do the “Lost key - Recover an EOS Genesis Account” because I used the account.

Anyone know of any options at this point, or am I sol?

#2

Backups out of Anchor are manual (you can backup from the Home area, and save a JSON file). However, there are also copies of your entire wallet loaded in your operating systems user profile as well. If you managed to save a copy of your user profile, there’s a chance it’s all in that folder.

Few questions for ya:

  • Which operating system are you using?
  • You said you “saved all the files”, what files did you end up backing up?
#3

windows 10.

all my files, however i’m not sure if i ever did a manual backup

#4

If you have all the files from the machine, I’d go looking for the folders below. The paths I’m giving you are where the files were on the machine before it was formatted, so the exact path might have changed based on wherever you saved all that data.

C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Anchor Wallet

or

C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\Anchor Wallet

If you can find that folder from the machine before you formatted, make a copy of it immediately somewhere safe - that folder contained the working directory for Anchor and it’s data on the pre-formatted operating system, and can potentially be used to restore the account.

If you do find that old folder from your old operating system…

  1. Install Anchor, don’t start it.
  2. Close Anchor if it’s installed and already running (check the system tray in the lower left to ensure it’s not running in the background either, or check task manager and kill all Anchor processes). Restart your computer if you’re not sure how to do the above, and don’t start Anchor after the reboot.
  3. Find the current Anchor folder using one of the exact paths above. You’re looking for the configuration folder of your new installation, not the old installation folder.
  4. Once you find that folder, just to be safe, rename the config.json file to config.something.json (if it exists). Make sure you have a copy of it in the event you accidently overwrite a good version.
  5. Go into the folder you found in the first part of this post, and find the config.json file from your pre-formatted machine. The timestamp on it should be from before you formatted your computer. You can open this file with a text editor if you want and do a “Find” in it to search for your account name. If you find your account name in there, it’s the right file and this file is the one that has an encrypted version of your keys.
  6. Create a copy of this config.json file from the pre-formatted computer, and save it in multiple places. Put one copy of it in the folder you found in step 3.
  7. Make sure you have copies of all these config.json files! The one from the pre-formatted computer is the one with your keys in this situation, and you want to make sure you don’t lose that one if it’s the only place you have your keys saved.
  8. Once you have the config.json file put into the folder on the newly installed operating system, and are absolutely sure you have a backup outside of that folder as well - go ahead and start Anchor.

If it works, the wallet should open up and run just like it did on your old operating system.

Sorry for the detailed warnings as I wrote that out - but I just wanted to make sure that if this was potentially the only place your keys existed, you had a bit of guidance on creating extra copies and not doing anything during this process that would cause you to lose them :sweat_smile:

#5

perfect, thank you it worked!

1 Like
#6

So glad to hear it! :+1: