doc, wallet: Add wallet corruption recovery guidance to managing-wallets.md #35944

pull pablomartin4btc wants to merge 1 commits into bitcoin:master from pablomartin4btc:doc/wallet-corruption-recovery changing 1 files +19 −0

pablomartin4btc commented at 2:08 PM on August 10, 2026: member

Adds section 1.7 "Recovering from a Corrupted Wallet" to doc/managing-wallets.md. Documents that restoring from a known-good backup is the only supported recovery path for corrupted wallet databases, and that there is no safe in-place repair mechanism.

Motivated by achow101's conclusion in #35605:

we should make the only supported corruption recovery mechanism be to restore a backup and not do any of this stuff with maybe being able to recover.

Note: the error message at walletdb.cpp:1050 currently says "This can be fixed by removing transactions from wallet and rescanning." — that message is inconsistent with this guidance and should be updated as a follow-up (or in #35605 or #35760, both of which are touching the related code paths).

doc: add wallet corruption recovery guidance to managing-wallets.md

Adds section 1.7 "Recovering from a Corrupted Wallet" to
doc/managing-wallets.md. The section documents that restoring from a
known-good backup is the only supported recovery path for corrupted
wallet databases, and that there is no safe in-place repair mechanism.

Motivated by achow101's conclusion in #35605: "we should make the only
supported corruption recovery mechanism be to restore a backup and not
do any of this stuff with maybe being able to recover."

4b5c6b140c

DrahtBot added the label Docs on Aug 10, 2026
DrahtBot commented at 2:08 PM on August 10, 2026: contributor



The following sections might be updated with supplementary metadata relevant to reviewers and maintainers.



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For details see: https://corecheck.dev/bitcoin/bitcoin/pulls/35944.



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pablomartin4btc renamed this:
~~doc: Add wallet corruption recovery guidance to managing-wallets.md~~
doc, wallet: Add wallet corruption recovery guidance to managing-wallets.md
on Aug 10, 2026

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#35605 wallet: rpc: Deprecate `removeprunedfunds` RPC #35760 wallet: make corrupted transaction records fail wallet loading instead of forcing a rescan

doc, wallet: Add wallet corruption recovery guidance to managing-wallets.md #35944

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