Sorry can you help me understand this?  Why would loading a new wallet require a rescan?  Isn't a wallet something that stores your private key and transactions or something?  What is it that I'm rescanning?

Right, I mean I synced the entire ledger today before opening my wallet.  So everything should be synced up?

I looked at the debug.log file, I saw this:

2020-10-02T05:41:42Z [Bitcoin_wallet_7-4-2017.dat] Rescan completed in         4257163ms

For some reason it had to do some kind of rescan when I opened the wallet.

More in the logs:

2020-10-02T04:30:44Z Using BerkeleyDB version Berkeley DB 4.8.30: (April  9, 2010)
2020-10-02T04:30:44Z Using wallet /datapool/ledger/wallets/Bitcoin_wallet_7-4-2017.dat
2020-10-02T04:30:44Z init message: Loading wallet...
2020-10-02T04:30:44Z [Bitcoin_wallet_7-4-2017.dat] Wallet File Version = 130000
2020-10-02T04:30:44Z [Bitcoin_wallet_7-4-2017.dat] Keys: 0 plaintext, 203 encrypted, 203 w/ metadata, 203 total. Unknown wallet records: 0
2020-10-02T04:30:44Z [Bitcoin_wallet_7-4-2017.dat] Wallet completed loading in              51ms

I synced the entire blockchain, 350gig.  Or did you mean a different kind of sync?

Nah it is an encrypted 4 gig file that can only be mounted with veracrypt with a strong password.  I keep it on my local machine and it backs up to my server computer in the other room which has a Raid5 configuration in Ubuntu using openZFS.  I also encrypt that mount file with a different password with 7z and send backups to my brother every month over syncthing.  Overall, it is "safe", but it taking so long to open the wallet file had me worried.  It has over $5000 worth of bitcoin in it.

Side Question, any idea why it took Bitcoin Core so long to open the file?  It must have taken at least an hour...

[Solved] I'm dumb, bitcoin core eventually opened the wallet after an hour.  No password/passphrase though.  But, I keep this wallet in an encrypted mount with veracrypt so it is kinda safe.

I should move all the BTC in this wallet to a new wallet though right?  A safer one?  Any suggestions?

You mean it has a passphrase? I suppose.  But when I open the wallet I thought it was suppose to ask me for the passphrase so decrypt it?  Or am I missing something?

I think I found the address of my old wallet from a transaction on my cell phone where bitcoin is installed, probably sent as a test years ago.  Not sure if this is helpful or not.

I found an old file called "Bitcoin_wallet_7-4-2017.dat" in a backup that I have. I downloaded the entire ledger with bitcoin core and copied the DAT file into the "wallets" directory. When I try to open it it just loads their forever, not doing anything.

Questions:

1.) How do I get the address out of this wallet dat file?

2.) When you backup a wallet, you just need the dat file right? Nothing else? Maybe it isn't a complete backup

3.) Any other way to get into what this wallet has?


Note I tried this: https://cryptomining-blog.com/9488-how-to-easily-recover-old-wallet-dat-private-keys-with-pywallet/

But it didn't work. Error:

WARNING:root:pycrypto or libssl not found, decryption may be slow

    Traceback (most recent call last):

    File "c:\zip\pywallet.py", line 2111, in parse_wallet

    d.update(parse_BlockLocator(vds))

    TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable

Tried electrum too, that gave me a long hex error.