Quote from: jackg on June 05, 2017, 09:37:22 PM

Quote from: cr1776 on June 05, 2017, 09:30:02 PM

Quote from: jackg on June 05, 2017, 08:34:08 PM

Quote from: HCP on June 05, 2017, 08:28:08 PM

Quote from: jackg on June 05, 2017, 08:13:15 PM

No. Electrum also requires the entire data file as do most desktop/computer wallets.

That is just plain wrong. The entire point of HD wallets like Electrum is that the entire thing can be restored using only the 12 word seed. So, if OP's "PASSPHRASE" is 12 words... and he was using Electrum a simple wallet restore is possible.

It all depends what wallet was being used tho.

Electrum isn't a hardware wallet? If I damage my hard drive and lose the backup of my electrum wallet, then I can no access the information from it. As Electrum has no central servers to store the data on it.

Are you thinking of the hardware parts of electrum? If so, then you can definitely restore from them by just plugging them into your computer and putting in the pass code. But the regular version of electrum does not have this.

It's just an executable written in python. https://electrum.org/#download

HD wallets like electrum can be recovered from the seed words without anything on the computer. We don't know if he is using electrum though. From his comments, it sounds like it could be a HD wallet though.

Have I compiled my electrum wallet wrong then? If I try to recover it from anything by my recovery drive then it always creates a fresh wallet (although whether that's a security thing or not i'm not sure).

Anyway, sorry for accidently hijacking this thread in my previous and this response. The phassphrase that he references, is required for bitcoin-qt but I'm not sure that encrypts it as that is written in plain text as far as I know so if it is for core then it will only be useful if the rest of the file is there.

Electrum(1) and Bitcoin Core(2) wallets created in version 0.13.0 or later are HD wallets.

Electrum will give a seed phrase or seed words like "constant forest adore false green weave stop guy fur freeze giggle clock" which will allow one to recreate the wallet on a new machine or anywhere else. You could put Electrum on a new computer, enter those words, and everything should return to normal.

Bitcoin Core wallets created prior to 0.13.0 will not be HD wallets unless transferred to a new HD wallet, but once you have a master HD wallet in Bitcoin Core, backing it up once should be sufficient to restore the entire wallet.

Whether the "passphrase of several words" is one like the one above or the password that locks the wallet.dat (or other wallet file) is the open question. Once malikzfs gives more information about what wallet he was using etc it will help to be able to give better advice.

See:

(1) http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html
(2) see e.g https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/08/23/release-0.13.0/