Wallet migration

Provisional in-wallet help

There are two situations where a wallet needs to be migrated. Older JSON wallets are migrated to the latest database format. And more recent database wallets are also migrated to the latest format when necessary.

If your wallet migrated successfully, just click the finish button and this wizard will close and your wallet will open.

Backups

All wallet migrations back up the wallet within the same directory the original wallet file is located. The process can be illustrated as follows:

  1. A user opens a wallet named mywallet.
  2. The migration process will rename mywallet to mywallet.backup.1. If that file name is already in use, then it will increase the number at the end. It will try and use mywallet.backup.2, and if that fails it will try mywallet.backup.3 and so on.
  3. The migration process will create the migrated wallet as mywallet.sqlite

Migration problems

For the most part, there will not be any problems encountered when migrating your wallet. But some wallets will fail to migrate, and if that happens to you, you should be able to use the information below to aid you in discovering why or what to do in this situation.

Why did it fail?

There is only one identified situation where wallet migration fails. This is where the wallet data is incomplete, and the migration process cannot link it together and finds that data it needs is missing.

What can I do?

Open the wallet using ElectrumSV 1.2.5 and wait for it to synchronize. Make sure it connected to the network to do so, and that it is fully up-to-date. In order to maintain sane wallet file names you may want to:

  1. Delete the failed .sqlite migrated wallet.
  2. Rename the .backup.1 file to it's original name.
To understand the cause of the naming, it may help to read the backup section above.

Otherwise, please follow these steps:

  1. Open a DOS window, shell or terminal depending on your operating system.
  2. Run ElectrumSV from the command-line with the extra argument -v=debug. For example:

    MacOS: /Applications/ElectrumSV.app/Contents/MacOS/1.3.11 -v=debug
    Windows: ElectrumSV-1.3.11.exe -v=debug
    This should output debugging information which will be useful for whomever attempts to fix the problem.
  3. Find the original wallet file, or the backup the failed migration process created, and open it. It should fail migration again.
  4. Exit ElectrumSV, and then copy the output which should also include an error.
  5. Submit an issue providing both that output and as much information as possible.