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?
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
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)
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?
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.
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.
The restoration process in node-in-box packages like umbrel is imo deeply flawed. Deleting channel database is very bad idea even in scenarios where the database may not be completely up to date (to rescue zombies, in-flight htlcs etc). There must be shift in education and practice. The restoration process should never delete original database, but rather rename and keep it around. Replacing something like “rm -f” with “mv” would make countless bitcoins recoverable.
In your case, as long as you can find your channelpoint, remote pubkey and the peer is still online (which I suppose it is), you can recover stucked funds with chantools in couple minutes.
Was your channel public, or private one? Can you share your pubkey?
I have an Albey Hub Backup Key and an Alby Extension Seed Key. I believe one of the two channels was closed, but the channel that had 250k stats in it was a private channel I believe. I wasn’t exactly sure as it was the very first time I had tried anything with Lightning.
1)You had 2 channels, one public and second private, right?
2)Do you remember with whom the private one was opened with?
You can follow opening transactions on mempool.space and determine if these channels were already closed or no. Sweeping closed channels manually is trivial part, but if they are not closed yet, you need to know remote pubkey in order to trigger remote force closure. This is what channel.backup mostly does. For public channel you can find it on amboss.space, but for private channel you have to remember peer’s alias or pubkey by other means. If you would be completely unaware who your peer was, your most likely option would be to set up alert on that channel’s address and wait for this peer to hopefully close this channel manually some time in the future. (alternatively you could set up script which would spam whole network with error messages, trying to randomly trigger closure this way, someone already did that, but I digress)
If you let me know your pubkey and also pubkey of your peer with whom you have had this channel, I will send you exact copy / paste instructions how to get them with chantools. (I will follow your node’s onchain wallet and assuming I find two channel openings, I can quickly pair things together, it will be 10x less work for me then trying to explain from scratch and you can then retrospectively learn from example later)
