Possibly lost access to my Alby Hub Wallet

Services Support
1

Hi, I’ve encountered an issue with a wallet I may have lost access to, and I wanted to share my troubleshooting steps. Hopefully, someone can point me in the right direction.

  1. I set up AlbyHub on my machine, using the LND service as my node/wallet.

  2. I opened a channel with about $14 of BTC on Alby Hub

  3. I had a power outage that corrupted my start 9 OS (I now have a UPS backup)

  4. After reinstalling the OS, I restored the AlbyHub service, but my opened channel is now missing.

  5. I installed the OS from scratch and restored my AlbyHub service and my wallet is missing. Is this because my wallet is actually inside of the LND service and not Alby Hub. If so, should restoring the LND service restore my wallet?

I don’t have any funds in this wallet, just an opened Lightning channel, but I want to make sure I set up and back up my wallet properly this time before I actually start using it.

One last question. If I pay $3 a month for Alby Pro I see it says “Encrypted remote backups”. Does this mean I can backup my wallet and/or channels there?

Any advice is much appreciated!

2

I don’t see from your description of what you did that you restored LND. If you don’t restore LND, how would AlbyHub see your LND funds?

Also worth mentioning that restoring LND would close your channel(s) with a force close. So that would take some time to see funds returned on chain.

Alby are diffidently the best people to ask about Alby’s own paid services.

3

I forgot to add that.

  1. I restored my LND node from my SSD backup.

I did not have any funds, just an opened channel I funded.

Do you know why my channel would force close on a restore? Also, if my node just goes down for like a couple of days, would that also force close all of my channels or is it only a restore?

I’ll ask Alby about their backup service.

Thanks!

4

If you opened a channel, that means you funded the channel with funds, and so hand funds. Those funds would be returned to you from the force close, if the force close happened correctly.

All lightning restores from Static Channels Backups force close the channels to recover the funds. (You can’t restore a backup from last week and have that backup contain the transactions from yesterday.)

Connecting something a little more detailed to your LND, such as Ride The Lightning, should show you if you have pending transactions, such as the force close.

5

Got it, thanks! I don’t remember seeing an on-chain wallet in Alby Hub—does it automatically create one if a channel is closed?

I’ll check out Ride The Lightning or a similar tool. Thanks again!

6

Alby Hub has no funds, lightning or on-chain, if using LND. It’s just an interface. A really good one but one that is less technical, so having RTL as a fall back is quite useful.

7

That makes sense, is LND also an onchain wallet? Like where exactly would I go to access returned closed channel funds?

8

Yes. You can’t open or close channels without onchain Bitcoins… otherwise where would the Bitcoin come from?

All lightning channels are onchain transactions, then an off-chain ledger tied to that transaction.

Here’s a good place to learn about what’s going on: Start9 | Opening Your First Channel

9

Right, that makes sense. So if I sent it from another lightening wallet then the funds would return to the onchain wallet that funded the source lighting wallet?

10

Funds would only be available to re-spend on chain if you closed the channel.

11

That makes sense, but what onchain wallet would the funds go too? Is there an onchain wallet built into the LND service or does it go to my original funding source?

I’m just asking since I sent the funds from an exchange

12

Your funds will be deposited into your LND on-chain wallet.

13

Great! I did not realize the LND service had a built in on chain wallet. Thanks!