LND Died, Auto-backups Failed, No more Channels?

At this point, I am extremely frustrated. I’ve posted on Discord and tried contacting Umbrel Support, only to be ignored—total silence for days…

So I’m running Alby Hub as a node and I opened up a channel of 220k stats as that was the minimum. All was fine so I thought and after a few day, I noticed that my LND had stopped functioning It was getting to 60% loading and logs said it had lost the keys or something.

I thought, “Well, I’ve got my 3 sets of keys, so I should be okay, right?” So I wiped my Umbrel VM and recreated it from scratch. I waited 4 days for it to re-download Bitcoin Node, Bitcoin-Knots, and LND. I put my keys back into LND, and it looked okay, but with no channels. Alby said I have no open channels and 0 stats in my wallet. It has stayed this way now far over a week.

I created the Alby hub chain on 14/15 Jan and discovered the error on LND around the 16th. But Umbrel had been installed just after Christmas day.

I went to download and then restore the backup channel data from tor backups but the latest backup was the 3rd Jan skipping to the 18th Jan for the next backups with the new working system. So it must have failed irrefutably in that time without me knowing.

I have no other backups, how can I release my money so I can start from scratch?


did you have an external drive for your umbrel node?

Its on a proxmox server

I just want my stats back… its a fair amount of BTC :cry:

I’m half hoping they’ll time out and return to my wallet.

I’m also gobsmacked at the level of almost no support for fixing this or explaining how this could even happen. The program crashes, and you just lose your money because… why not?

Was never told by either Umbrel or Alby that I needed to backup files during the creation of the channel or even check that LND was still operating Let alone had anything to do with each other. Alby just blames Umbrel and Umbrel is just crickets!

The LND program didn’t do what it was supposed to do… Bye-bye, $500.

I can start to see why Lightning isn’t taking off, it’s sad cuz I really wanted it to :frowning:

I feel like I’m being ignored. How can something like this even happen? Whats the point in having keys if they do next to nothing for you? :@

You need to be 100% sure that you have the latest channel state , if any doubt you should use SCB to recover your funds ‘off-chain’ (force close). Broadcasting an old channel state can lead to lost funds (punishment)

Read the Off-Chain Recovery section in LND docs

Awesome, thank you for your reply.

However, I really have no idea what I’m doing here and I’m kind of dcared of loosing all my money in this invisible channel I can no longer see.

LND crashed entirely, so it got wiped and installed a fresh. I don’t have this channel.backup` file.

Am I reading the right, from the Off-Chain Recovery - Obtaining SCBs - On-Disk channel.backup. or do I need to go down the Last resort manual force close - Using the ExportChanBackup RPC?

I’m kind of lost and don’t know what I’m doing.

OK so Umbrel appears to play it on the safe side when it comes to recovery or a lightning node. Their recovery process will find and force close all your channels instead of attempting to restore them and risk loosing funds with invalid state.

You should be able to uninstall LND app on your umbrel, and then re-install and use the recovery steps as shown here → https://x.com/umbrel/status/1562099972547690501?s=20&t=Tag86rox8mNolXiq9wT-zg&mx=2

That’s been the problem, though. Umbrel for some reason wasn’t creating a backup file from 3rd Jan till the 18th Jan. (I didn’t even know this option existed at the time it stopped working)

The reason I completely wiped the Umbrel VM from Proxmox, was because I deleted the LND app in Umbrel and reinstalled it. LND wouldn’t work at all…would stop at the 60% mark and the Logs simply said it couldn’t read the wallet files or something to that effect.

The Alby Hub channels were created around 15th Jan at a time when Umbrel for what ever reason wasn’t backing up like it was supposed to do. You can see the backup options I have in my first post.

If you do not have a channel backup, and wiped your previous install, I am not sure what you can do other than contact the node(s) you opened channels with and ask them to force close.

How could I find out who they were? Alby set everything up by itself and they say there is nothing they can do

You could try punching your nodes public key into 1ML.com or mempool explorer to see if it has a record of your nodes channels.

And check out this resource found via → https://www.node-recovery.com/

How to recover channels without an SCB file

If this does not lead you to recovery keep trying Umbrel support.