I'm back and trying to get this going again. I just tried -salvagewallet for the first time (this on dogecoin.app, not bitcoin yet).

This is on a new machine with new versions of the apps, freshly synced to their respective blockchains (which took about 2 months for bitcoin).

So I ran -salvagewallet on my dogecoin wallet. It did something that didn't take very long at all. Then after a minute or so, it quit and left me with wallet.242340234.back and wallet.dat. So I fired up dogecoin core.app and once it rescanned everything, I had..... an empty wallet. Which kind of makes sense since the .bak wallet was 12 MB and the new one, presumably the restored one, was a few KB.

Am I doing something wrong here? There's almost no instructions on the web for how to use the -salvagewallet feature, beyond "just use -salvagewellet".