The more keys it has to scan, the longer it will take. Besides running on a fast machine, theres not much else you can do to optimize it (and yes, the sync time before the various types of attack that came around after NU5 is like day and night)
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I also have an old wallet.dat from 2018. I don’t remember if there was ZEC in the wallet, but if there was it would probably have been shielded.
I loaded the old wallet.dat into zcashd 6.1.0 and reindexed. zcashd showed a balance of 0. debug.log reported 101 keys and 0 ZKeys.
Is that proof that there are no funds in the wallet and no shielded addresses? Does zcashd still support the original shielded addresses?
So what I did was run the zcash wallet CLI, then do “listaddresses” and in there I found my old Sapling shielded address. Then run getbalance to see the balance, then you have do a migration to a sprout address. If you need further info let me know!
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FYI I think you got it the other way around, you need to migrate from Sprout to Sapling (or Orchard)
Thank you. I found a legacy random transparent address under listaddresses. There wasn’t a shielded address listed so I guess that confirms this wallet.dat is empty.
You could set ‘-allowdeprecated=z_listaddresses’ and try that. All zcashd rpc commands pertaining to shielded addresses have a ‘z_’ prefix. The newer commands are intended for unified accts and not legacy sapling so you need the flag above to run that command. You can see more about that in zcash/doc/man and Zcash 6.1.0 RPC Docs
(If your debug.log info is accurate, though, it won’t help)
Okay so here’s what I did:
(Firstly @conradoplg was right we’re talking about Sprout addresses here, thank you for correcting me)
Backup Wallet
Have ZCashd fully sync
Restart with the following command
./src/zcashd -exportdir=/home/alan
(choose whatever path you want the backup to be in, that’s mine above)
Then run another command window in the Zcash folder, and type
./src/zcashd-wallet-tool
It will ask you to name your backup, and then give you the recovery phrase. Take a copy of this (photo/screenshot/whatever) then it will disappear and you’ll be asked to type some random words from the phrase.
Use ZCash CLI to find balance and then migrate to Sapling
For me to find my sprout address balance I did the following in a new terminal window started in the zcash folder:
./src/zcash-cli listaddresses
There should be your Sprout Address in there, copy this and run:
./src/zcash-cli z_getbalance zxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Where the zxxxxx is your sprout address. Hopefully it will show you a balance, then it’s time to run the migration tool. Do this by running:
./src/zcash-cli z_setmigration true
This will take a few days depending on your balance, but you can keep checking the status of the migration by typing:
./src/zcash-cli z_getmigrationstatus
As part of the migration it will automatically create you a new Sapling address in your wallet and begin migrating funds randomly every 500 blocks until the wallet is below 0.01 balance. For me, I had about 22 ZEC and it took about 3 days to migrate.
I hope this helps, took me a while to figure all this out as I’m not a native Linux or Command Line user but got there in the end and now I have transferred my funds to YWallet on my phone so they are easy access 
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Great to hear you managed to recover your funds.
And thanks for the detailed write up, hopefully it will help others who may find themselves in a similar situation.
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