HDD full of files, any worth...?

Question

Few years back, when the Ethereum started, I downloaded "geth" for Windows and started mining. I had it running 24/7 for several months with my (then) top of the line VGA.

After noticing that the Electricity bill was very high, and I realized that I cannot compete in a country with that expensive electricity, I stopped it. However, I kept all the generated files locally.

Now I have a folder structure of: /Ethererum /chaindata /ethash /geth /chaindata /ethash /nodes /nodes

First it looks like I have a copy of folders, so I had it running in /Ethereum and at some point I had another instance running in /Ethereum/geth

Under both "chaindata" folders there are ~60K files of "dddddd.ibd" files and some others like CURRENT, LOCK, LOG, LOG.old, MANIFEST-xxxxxxx.

I do not remember having an account, or wallet. Just had it mining.

Now I am on Linux, installed geth and tried to run it with "geth --datadir "/Ethereum"

When I did that, I am getting tons of logs like this:

INFO [02-22|11:02:52.835] Deep froze chain segment                 blocks=30001 elapsed=4.158s number=1650054 hash="c17d88…0914ff"
INFO [02-22|11:02:56.469] Deep froze chain segment                 blocks=30001 elapsed=3.634s number=1680055 hash="1df192…6de3b8"
INFO [02-22|11:03:00.164] Deep froze chain segment                 blocks=30001 elapsed=3.694s number=1710056 hash="ae6ee9…b31182"
INFO [02-22|11:03:04.061] Deep froze chain segment                 blocks=30001 elapsed=3.896s number=1740057 hash="436215…cce7f0"
INFO [02-22|11:03:07.951] Deep froze chain segment                 blocks=30001 elapsed=3.889s number=1770058 hash="22fcfc…a0c7ac"
INFO [02-22|11:03:11.908] Deep froze chain segment                 blocks=30001 elapsed=3.957s number=1800059 hash="dfa290…c3ed60"
WARN [02-22|11:03:12.476] Checkpoint challenge timed out, dropping id=e1b541d10cc201ab conn=dyndial addr=18.162.109.156:30304 type=Geth/v1.9.19-stable-...

Is there any way to retrieve and resume my work? What can I do from this point on?

Answer 1

There is no concept of "continuing" mining work. Mining is the process of calculating hash values, and any setup is capable of calculating a lot of them per second.

When mining, the mining rewards are always sent to some address. I don't think you can mine without specifying this address. So, when you started mining, you probably specified some address where the rewards should be sent to - access to that account that is the only thing worth saving.

So you should look for some keystore files or private keys or something similar. If you find way to access that account (address), it may have some mining rewards.

If you want to start mining again, you can just start synchronizing a node again and set a new mining reward address.