During the ethereum presale my brother and father contacted me encourage me to purchase. I thought all I have is $100 who cares right? Maybe I quadruple that will not change my life. So I never purchased but they did. 100 divided by $0.32 per ETH =$125,000 at $420 each.
My dad bought 3,000 ETH
Json file #1:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xbeb4fd315559436045dcb99d49dcec03f40c42dc
and then downloaded the Json file.
Then he bought 2,000 more ETH
Json file #2
https://etherscan.io/address/0x3df762049eda8ac6927d904c7af42f94e5519601 and downloaded this Json file Unfortunately they provide the exact same file name so the best we can figure is that he copied over his original Json file although he swears up and down that later on he was able to open both Json files when they came out with a wallet but we find no evidence of that in the appdata folder which creates new Json files or some kind of copies of the Json file with no file extension.
My brother purchased 2000 ETH
Json file #3
https://etherscan.io/address/0x007b9fc31905b4994b04c9e2cfdc5e2770503f42 and made some crazy-ass password upside down and backwards with symbols and crap, thought he was cool... promptly forgot his password!
So my dad not knowing he had lost his first file felt bad for my brother and gave him the 2,000 that he actually did have access to to day trade with. At that time was not a fortune. Well he's been hit in the head a few times and it doesn't function very well but for whatever reason ended up day trading it away.
Its been very though on me this past 2 months watching ETH go from $20 up to over $400 knowing I may never get this inheritance. We have had some ups and downs as we have recovered incorrect Json files. LOL
At night I dream of searching and finding the file only to wake up shouting for joy.
My dad has always been a treasure hunter and now he has passed on that passion on to me.
Update: June 12 evening. Thank you for everyone that is responding with help. There are some new suggestions that may be hopeful recovering the #1 Json file that may have been overwritten. Some things we've tried is checking 4 the email from the ethereum team that we got during the pre-sale. For whatever reason the email is not there. We cannot even find the email we know for sure we got because the email address is hard-coded into the #2 Json file that we do have.
We tried attaching the hard drive externally to a different machine and running a $300 version of https://www.easeus.com file recovery.
And as for #3 Json file? During pre-sale when my brother purchased he wrote down the password he chose and it's still not working. The password he wrote down should be dam close and Brute Force may end up working on that #3 Json file.
Update September 24th 2017:
After many many hours actually days of trying, searching, data recovery attempts and Brute Force... still no luck! I talked with my dad for hours and hours about that fateful night and It turns out the #1 Json file was never saved. He saved a link to the download page repeatedly to his desktop and thought that he was saving the Json file. Masive data recovery attempts have only lead us to believe the Json file was never downloaded at all.
#3 Json file with the password that simply does not work is confusing us. We've had strange success at unlocking it sort of if I put in the password in backwards. After a lot of research about the subject my conclusion is that we've stumbled on to a password that actually De Crips the encrypted private key but only for a different public address that has a zero balance. We have a cryptocurrency expert running Brute Force with no luck yet.
What bothers me about the password sort of working backwards is that the same thing has happened to other people. Also what are the odds that the password you think is the right one actually does something but only when put in backwards?
Search for any USB device that may have had the files added to it, or any external hard-drive. Search any email that may have had backups forwarded and later forgotten. The password he wrote down may show 0=O (zero and 'O') and certain letters are more prone to case-sensitive errors.
Here are some things that could be going wrong:
(0,O)zero and letter 'O' like mentioned above
(1,l) one and lowercase 'l'
(v,V) case sensitivity but they often look the same, others follow
(c,C) - (x,X) - (o,O) - (w,W) - (s,S) - (z,Z)
and depending on writing style you may rule out some of these
I hope this helps, best of luck to you ^_^
For the last week two weeks we've been experimenting with Brute Force doing exactly what you mentioned. We have to babysit the app though
cool that you found an app to help, I hope it works!
Great banter.
Thank you. My first post on steemit.
Reward!!! Any one that causes us to recover our ETH will be heavily rewarded!!!
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