After a lot of moving I am finally plugging in my RPi based Umbrel Bitcoin Full Node again and I would like to sweep all of the funds from the Node.
In doing this I realized that I had a LN channel open as of maybe 1.5 years ago and am having some difficulty restoring it and getting the funds back.
Full disclosure I am kind of a novice when it comes to LN and don’t know every little detail here but I will share what I have tried.
- When I first opened the node back up the channel was inactive and showed the max send, receive, and channel amount of 500,000 sats.
I was unable to close it after trying quite a few steps and waiting a few days as instructed in between.
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My next step, after backing up the channels to another device, was to update the node from about 0.5.1 to the current 1.4.1 The node looked exactly the same here and after trying to close the channel again I was still unable to do so.
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Next I went ahead and did some research on this forums with most posts that were similar suggesting I delete the Lightning Node and reinstall again to try and forece. recovery and closure from another angle.
This also happened to delete the on-chain wallet (why is it in the Lightning Node and not it’s own app??) but luckily I was able to restore it via the words.
Upon restoring it the LN channel was not found, just blank, but at least the on-chain wallet was restored.
- Next I tried to restore from the channel backup I manually made. The node told me to wait a day or two and after doing this twice, only to come back to see no channels.
I then tried to restore from a much older backup. I found one on the device itself from about 1.5 years back (perhaps when it was online?) and went through that process.
This did at least make it so that the channel was listed with a bit of red text saying “closing” but the max send and max receive were both now 0 even though in the details it said the max capacity was 500,000 sats.
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Moving forward from here do I just wait a few more days for it to close and then the 500,000 sats will be returned to my on-chain wallet?
Or, is the 0 for max send and receive indicating that something is wrong and that even if it closes nothing will be returned?
Part of me wants to try an even older backup but I will wait at least 3 days before doing so to see if this one clears.
I am attaching a screenshot of what I can see currently.
Bottom line I would really like to recover those sats and sweep them off. Willing to do anything, try any command line magic spells, or share anything else reasonable to assist with this process.
Thank you for your insight.
