A fresh, empty wallet.dat is usually 88kb to 96kb. A heavily used old wallet (with many keys) can be 500kb+. Anomalous sizes (like 0kb or 100mb+) indicate corruption or encryption quirks.
If you have an old backup, treat it like a relic. Air-gap it. Print the private keys on paper. Store them in a bank vault. Do not let your future fortune become someone else's exclusive recovery project. old walletdat exclusive
Wallets from 2009 and 2010 may contain "Satoshi era" coins. These are block rewards from when mining could still be done on a basic home computer CPU. Each block reward during this time was worth 50 BTC. 2. Accidental Hard Forks A fresh, empty wallet
The wallet.dat file is a Berkeley DB database file used by Bitcoin Core (formerly Bitcoin-Qt) and many other early altcoins. It acts as a container for all the private keys necessary to spend the Bitcoin associated with your public addresses. If you have an old backup, treat it like a relic