Node Storage Failure and Recovery

StartOS Support
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1

Afternoon all,
Running Start9 latest on a proxmox node with dedicated storage for start9.
The Drives had a failure, which shouldn’t happen but did.

I tried to restore from the old drive itself but encounter no end of RPC errors on read and abandoned that recovery path.

I eventually chose to restore from backup, which worked and the blockchain has been re-syncing for several days now. As I write this sitting at about 80%

I want to verify I understand what happens next.

Thunderhub and LND are both running, my node shows online in Amboss but all channels have closed. I think this is expected from what I’ve read but I didn’t fully understand that.

Node id:

My questions are:
Am I correct in assuming those channels are gone forever? There’s no way to re-initialize or restore?
If not, how does one restore, or properly close and recover funds?
Is there a guide on how to recover funds?

I’ll wait for the blockchain to fully sync before I “meddle” with anything but any ideas, instructions or insights would be greatly appreciated.

2

With Lightning being dynamic in nature, there’s literally no way to back up channels in their working state. It would be physically impossible to back up channels each millisecond. All you can do is make a record of how the channels were opened and with whom so that in a disaster you have a record of them and can request that your channel partner use their record of balances at the time of last contact to force-close to restore funds on chain. You’d then wait for them to return. Then you would not open channels again on that instance of LND.

3

I see, so contact all the channels I had open, ask them to force close.

Once that is done I delete LND off start9, wait a few days, reinstall it and start over?

4

No, the restoration of a static channel backup causes LND to request the channels close automatically. If someone’s not going it, you can restart LND to trigger the request again. If they don’t, then you might need to contact them.

Yes, LND says to never use the backup restoration instance to create a new LN node.

5

I must have missed an entire section in the documentation on restoration of a node.

Has that static backup been restored then with the default restore node of Start9?

If not, do I grab the backup from Amboss which I have been pushing. Use that restore procedure in Thunderhub and wait?

6

I don’t think you missed anything, our documentation is related to StartOS and running a server… we don’t have lightning fundamental tutorials. Best place for that is maybe BTCSessions on YouTube. We have some guides for services that you can run on StartOS, but the lightning one does tell you to study the concepts before allocating funds.

When you restore LND or CLN on StartOS, it will restore the onchain wallet, and it will load the static channel backup to trigger force closures. There’s no way to apply any other kind of backup format from elsewhere.

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