Creating a Watchonly Wallet After Migrating to Descriptor Wallets

I just moved my old wallet to a descriptor wallet using Bitcoin Core v28.0.0. I wanna keep track of it, so I’m trying to set up a watchonly wallet. I made a new wallet without private keys and imported two wpkh descriptors for receiving and change addresses. But here’s the catch: since it’s a merged wallet, the watchonly will only monitor future transactions.

You mean "migrated"? If that's the case, the descriptors for those migrated keys should pop up when you run the listdescriptors command. Just copy everything and import them again with importdescriptors. But, if your old wallet wasn’t HD, this could take forever since each key gets imported as a "combo" descriptor.

Yeah, I meant "migrated". Fixed the title, thanks! I ran into some errors while importing descriptors, no clue what went wrong. I asked "Copilot" and it told me I could import all addresses from the legacy wallet in one go. That worked problem solved!

Errors usually tell you what’s up, including any syntax issues. There’s an addr descriptor you can use for directly importing addresses. The combo descriptors work like your old wallet, covering all major script types for each key, except TapRoot.

Don't forget to set the timestamp right when importing. You can also force a rescan with rescanblockchain after importing. Once that’s done, you should see all historical transactions pop up.