What possible explanation could there be that Bitcoin Core on Linux Mint claims to but does not save the wallet backups? Linux Mint. Bitcoin Core 0.21.0.
I go to &quot;File&quot; and &quot;Backup wallet&quot;, then select any location. I've tried with /home/a and /tmp and others.
Every time, Bitcoin Core says that the file has been successfully saved to the location I picked.
Then I look at that location in the GUI file manager, as well as in the terminal. THE WALLET .DAT BACKUP FILES ARE JUST NOT THERE!
I swear I'm not making this up and that I've enabled &quot;Show hidden files&quot; and tried everything to make sure that I'm not doing something wrong.
The files just are not saved, even though Bitcoin Core claims that they are. Why?
They are just not there on my file system. The only wallet.dat that exists is the actual one that Bitcoin Core itself saved, and it has put that in: /home/a/.var/app/org.bitcoincore.bitcoin-qt/data/blablabla/wallet.dat
At this point, having tried and asked and searched so much, I'm starting to truly question my sanity as well as the QA of Linux/Bitcoin Core.
This is even worse than various file nonsense in Windows. Is there some secret, very well hidden setting that I need to enable to &quot;actually show the files&quot; or something? Beyond &quot;Show hidden files&quot;?
What possible explanation could there be that Bitcoin Core on Linux Mint claims to but does not save the wallet backups?

Possible explanations include:

The path to the saved file is not what you think it is

using a relative path rather than an absolute path
using a chrooted program


Some higher level of security is preventing you seeing the files

SELinux?


There is a bug in Bitcoin core. This seems unlikely but if you can reproduce the behaviour on another machine you could document the exact circumstances in a bug report.


footnote 1
All normal Linux systems have a large number of default users and not just the one you use to log in normally. If you cat /etc/passwd you'll see a list. It will include a root user (and around a dozen others) unless the system has been substantially modified from the typical arrangement.

footnote 2
You can make your own backups of the wallet.dat but, for extra reassurance, you could practice extracting the private key using the debug-console then importing the data into a new wallet (of any type) on another computer and verifying that you can create spending transactions there.