How to recover a bitcoin wallet on a Windows drive amid 30 gigabytes of files

Question

I need to recover a bitcoin wallet that I created about 8 years ago.

I was a kid, and I thought I would be super clever and zip or rar the wallet, then change the extension to an image file. I uploaded it to my website.

I have a backup of the website, it is about 30 gigs, it contains thousands of images. I can limit by file size as my zip/image file is most likely small. But because it hosts a ton of web pages there is thousands of tiny image files.

How can I recover this wallet?

Questions

• Is it possible to search for file that say they are images but are not?
• Is it possible to find all files that are compressed regardless of file type?

Answer 1

PowerShell: Verify if not an image file regardless of file extension

You can use the below PowerShell to spit the full file name for each file processed using the Bitmap Class of the System.Drawing Namespace which is not a valid image in red to the output.

The files that are not valid image types regardless of the file extensions will be the ones listed in red that you will want to check first to see if these are the files you changed years ago.

If the file is a valid image type regardless of its file extension, it will not be listed.

PowerShell

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Drawing;
Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\SearchFolder" -File -Recurse -Filter "*.*"  | % { Process {
    If ( $_.Length -gt 0 ) {
        $fn = $_.FullName;
        $img = "";
        Try { $img = New-Object System.Drawing.Bitmap $_.FullName } Catch { Write-Host $fn -ForegroundColor Red };
        }
}};

Output Example

Note: These will be the files that are not valid images you should check first.

C:\SearchFolder\CentosScripts.zip.png
C:\SearchFolder\epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
C:\SearchFolder\Test432\firmware.zip
C:\SearchFolder\Test432\Test\Greenshot-INSTALLER-1.2.10.6-RELEASE.exe
C:\SearchFolder\Test123\Test\irc_Silo2_Level.txt

Supporting Resources

• Add-Type
• Get-ChildItem
• ForEach-Object

  Standard Aliases for Foreach-Object: the '%' symbol, ForEach

• If()
• System.Drawing Namespace
• Bitmap Class
• Try {...} Catch {...} Finally {...}