Recently had a failure of my node. I used the start9 backup to recover and restore lnd. While waiting for the blockchain to restore, i just wanted to ask a few questions with regards to recovery:
Once the blockchain is restored and I start LND, will LND auto broadcast the SCB file and request my peers to close?
Will lnd auto sweep funds to an onchain address?
How long is this process and how can i monitor?
If my peers happen to be offline themselves then am i stuck until they come back online?
When LND starts after an StartOS Backup restore. It will contact your peers, requests they broadcast the latest commitment transaction, and once confirmed on-chain, sweeps the funds back to your on-chain LND wallet.
The whole process can take anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days depending on mempool congestion and the CSV timelock on your channels.
if a peer is offline, you’re waiting on them. With SCB recovery you can’t unilaterally force-close — you’re relying on peers to initiate the close. If a peer is gone permanently, recovering those funds is very difficult. But as long as your peers are reachable, the process is largely automatic and you just need to be patient.
Once all channels are closed and funds are swept, do not continue using this LND instance. You should sweep all on-chain funds out to an external wallet, then do a fresh install of LND. Continuing to use a restored instance risks channel state corruption, potential fund loss, and broadcasting outdated states. Treat this recovery node as temporary — get your funds out and start clean.
You can monitor transactions on mempool.space or SSH to StartOS server and LND container and use commands like lncli pendingchannels, lncli walletbalance, and lncli closedchannels.
It turns out my start 9 os backup was actually a bit old unfortunately, but I do have the SCB file string saved from thunderhub, which is up-to-date.
Can i just rebroadcast the latest scb file in thub, or do i need to re-install lnd from scratch without the old scb already broadcast? If so, how do i restore LND with just my aezeed cipher seed in start 9?
I guess having the latest SCB string from Thunderhub matters most. You’ll want to start fresh rather than rebroadcast on the same instance, as LND may get confused with conflicting state.
However, LND on StartOS doesn’t officially support restoring from the aezeed seed alone—only supported backup/restore method is the StartOS backup flow. From what I understand, seed-based recovery requires command line (no GUI option). You’d have to SSH in, access your LND container, and run commands.
Order of operations would look like: fresh LND install → restore aezeed seed via CLI → apply latest SCB string from Thunderhub or CLI.
That said, I’ve never done it this way—perhaps there’s a better approach. I’d recommend waiting for more feedback from our community before proceeding.