Hi. I had been running Start9 in Proxmox. I didn’t like it there, tbh. I decided to run it natively. At this point I had Bitcoin Core, LND and Alby Hub. I had used Alby Hub to open one Lightning channel with LND. It was a-ok, except I didn’t care for Podman running under Proxmox’s networking.
I took a good backup. I flashed my server to run Start9 natively (loving it btw) and used my NAS backup to restrore my apps.
In Alby Hub, I no longer had a Lightning channel, but I added another. I +DO+ see my on-chain balance, and ironically I see all the lightning sat-transfers mostly inbound, but my Spending Balance is zero.
I’ve been exchanging notes with Jean-Paul. He aimed me at my static channel backup file (Alby: Your Bitcoin & Nostr companion for the web) but this page is a blank white page. There’s no file here to download?
" Before proceeding: If you are a subscriber with your Alby Hub on Alby Cloud, please contact Alby Support to check if VSS is enabled for your account. VSS (Virtual Static Storage) allows you to recover your channels along with the funds. This feature is enabled by default for all Hubs created after December 9, 2024 (Hub version 1.11.1 ).
If your Hub was created after this date, simply start a new Hub, go to Advanced > Import Recovery Phrase , and recover your channels without force-closing them. You don’t need this guide or the recovery tool."
My Alby Hub is 1.13.0… very cool! … so I simply go to >> Advanced > Import Recovery Phrase where the heck is that??
I found my recovery phrase in LND – pretty cool btw.
I am trying to be calm. Everything about Lightning was pretty good. The backup procedure in Start9 is GREAT! I was rolling on a new native node in almost no time at all… but now I am hard-stuck getting Alby Hub going again.
“I did a backup recovery and my channels closed, why?”
If so, its because of the nature of static backups, in that the static backups can never be dynamic. What that means is… how could a backup of your channels ever know what the state of the channels is at any time between when you made the backup and when you restored it. i.e. if your 1m sat channel was 50/50 when you made the backup, it was 45/65 one week later when you restored it… you’d be restoring the channels at 50/50, your channel partners would see your attempt to scam them, a justice transaction would ensue and you’d lose all your funds.
What happens when you restore from a static channel backup (SCB) is that you request a force close of the channel, relying on partners and watchtowers to agree on the current state.
Backup restorations are for… restoring backups… i.e. for emergencies. Disasters. They’re not for transferring services from one setup to the next. You can use them for this, for some services, but certainly not for lightning. Transferring services is done this way: Start9 | Transfer Data to a New Drive - or a variation of that way when dealing with VMs.
Hi. Thanks for your note. I appreciate it. I do.
It no-longer surprises me that my Lightning channel was closed. Yea… for continuity… and stability, closing that “old” and no-longer-connected channel makes tons of sense to me.
I’ll even concede that had I known (in advance of my hardware swap) I would have done some due diligence with regard to Alby backups. Sure… I guess.
BUT… are the Start9 backups sufficient to recover failed hardware? Isn’t that the definition of the word backup? Otherwise I’d have to know to do that Alby backup before xyz-component fails overnight… and then I am heading for new hardware, just the same. See what I’m saying. I’m in that very same boat. You might say I was a little carefree about the jump I made… but I still should be able to recover… right?
Should I try to return to my VM-based solution?? Is that the only way to get recovery files? Would my OG Lightning channel… like re-open?
I’ll say it another way. I took a Start9 backup… and moved to what is ostensibly new hardware. Start9 in a hypervisor has no idea that it’s not bare-metal. So are Start9 backups not sufficient to recover from a hardware failure?
I’d really like to see this work again, but if there is no way to recover the funds I had. This all seems really frail at the moment.
Thanks… sorry if I seem grumpy. I’m just frustrated. Tom
Your post doesn’t read as grumpy at all, but I’m also not entirely sure what your concern is regarding backups. They are indeed completely sufficient to recover from hardware failure… you just went through the process of “emulating” a hardware failure by nuking your VM and then restoring the backup to a new machine without anything going wrong.
Is this regarding LND or CLN? As I explained in my previous message, this is how SCBs work, this is not a StartOS thing at all. There’s no other way for them to work and you seemed (I suppose I read it wrong) to provide some detail showing that in your case the restoration was successful. The channel was force-closed and you received the funds on chain, that what I understood initially, but it now looks like that was other onchain funds.
In this latest message you say there’s no way to recover the funds you had. Of course there is, the restoration process triggers a force close, where you receive the funds from channels back on chain.
Backup restoration of CLN or LND is for absolute disasters only, because things can of course go wrong with both experimental pieces of software and with particular channels and peers. You’d never use this as a way to move a CLN or LND service from one machine to another. Again, not a StartOS thing, but a CLN or LND.
If you haven’t received your funds yet, you probably need to just wait. It could also be that your peer did not respect the force close. I’d wait a couple of weeks or use the command line to look up the transactions in the mempool.
You said that the force close of the channel would begin a process whereby I would receive the sats that had been in the spending balance part of my Ably Hub, and I’d receive them in the the OnChain part of my AH. Am I reading that correctly?
I +DO+ have an open, not especially funded, Lightning channel open to where I think I had a channel before — is that enough?
If this is automatic, that changes things. Not sure if you know this scene from Pulp Fiction… “that’s all you had to say!”
Hope I’ve got this right. Thanks for jumping in. I was miserable.
Correct. The force close isn’t instant, the funds can remain in a limbo for some time. It’s co-operative closes where both parties are involved and agree that can be near instant.
As I said, there are ways to poke about in LND to find the TXs and then track them… but it’s probably not worth getting into unless a couple of weeks have passed.
Another thing to keep in mind, is that Alby Hub is in no way involved in your funds or them returning. Alby Hub is nothing more than a user interface to interact with LND.