Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on my problem..
I sent bitcoins to my offline wallet BitcoinQT(0.81) in august.
The transaction has been confirmed, but not redeemed, (due to my offline wallet not being synced i believe)
I encrypted today, before bitcoinqt had completed initial sync.
Now i've just realised that I've probably lost the associated change address in the unencrypted wallet. as the address it was sent to was not the same as the receive address that showed in bitcoinQTfrom the unencrypted wallet.
i have no backup of the unencrypted wallet.dat
Questions:
Q1. Am I correct that i've lost my bitcoins?
Q2. Does bitcoinqt overwrite the wallet.dat file when it encrypts the wallet? or does it create a new copy, such that I may be able to recover the old wallet.dat using recovery sw like testdisk?
Q3. If answer to Q2 is not overwritten, what is the likelihood of being able to retrieve the unencrypted wallet.dat or change addresses considering the bitcoinqt client was syncing/processing blocks for about 20mins before i shutdown?
Q4. Would it be possible to recover the wallet.dat from the app data folder in a system restore (winxp)?
Thanks again,