I Can?t Get Access to my Bit Coin Private Key

Posted by oxfordrecovery on April 22nd, 2014

For those of us still getting to grips with the principle of Bit Coins it is something that looks as though it is going to take off in a major way in the not too distant future.  To this end we here are going to start taking Bit Coin payments from our clients if they have the facility by which to pay us.

Setting up a Bit Coin wallet involves what is known as PGP, which means the production of private and public key pairings.  This is the means by which you can send and receive Bit Coins.  The public element of the key pairing is the key by which others pay you and the private element is the means by which you can access, transfer and withdraw your own Bit Coins as and when you wish to do so.

In order for the whole process to work correctly you need to have access to these key pairings at all time.  If you find yourself in the position where the public key is known then Bit Coins can be sent to you but without the private key you cannot do anything with them once they arrive at your ‘address’.

Many users tend to have an offline ‘wallet’ or ‘Cold Storage’ whereby the information in private/public key pairings is kept on their hard drive or other storage device such as a USB stick.  Indeed while some of us have advanced enough to use Bit Coins we still keep these key pairings written down which is not always the best idea; after all paper can be shredded, lost, washed accidentally or stolen in the worst case scenario. 

We cannot stress the importance of maintaining these keys however; without your private key your funds are effectively lost. 

While Bit Coin software (depending on which software you use) will generate a seed (a 12 word combination) a great many of us will also save that to disk or USB as well leaving you in a doubly precarious position if the device in particular fails.

This poses a whole host of problems should the hard drive or USB device fail.  It’s worth bearing in mind that storing the information to a USB memory stick, whilst a good idea, is not really all that much more secure than saving it to a hard drive.  USB sticks are prone to breakage or to being written over a lot more easily than an internal or external hard drive would be. 

If you find that you cannot access your private/public key pairing because of a faulty storage device switch off immediately.  We don’t recommend trying to restore or repair anything yourself but this is not meant as a slight towards you.  Problems can occur during the restoration process or third party recovery software process to which end data can be overwritten with older versions or indeed lost altogether.

If your hard drive is failing you should get some kind of warning.  It may well be a slowing down of the machine or error messages displayed as the notorious ‘Blue Screen of Death’ or even the sudden freezing of the computer altogether.

If your computer freezes and you have important information contained on it such as your Bit Coin wallet we would strongly advise against trying to restart it for fear of exacerbating the problem.

Leaving the computer – desktop PC or laptop – switched off and contact us immediately and we will be able to help you recover your data.  We have a 99.9% success rate in this field and welcome enquiries from new and existing clients.

Welcome to Cambridge Data Recovery, we are a leading data recovery company for all your, Camera Media and USB Stick recovery requirements in and around Oxford. More information visit External Hard Drive Recovery, Laptop Hard Drive Data Recovery, Mac Data Recovery

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Joined: April 22nd, 2014
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