SSD failure and time needed to recover

Support and Troubleshooting
1

I’ve been running my umbrel node for over a year and have all my recovery information and channels backed up. I use crontab to run maintenance task that I prefer to automate. Last week my SSD died, and all my channels are down while I download the Bitcoin core Ledger.

I would like to keep a current copy of my one terabyte SSD drive, and my current idea for this is to run a command once a week or so via crontab to clone the SSD to another one terabyte SSD attached to my system.

Does anybody have any input as to whether this is a good idea, any problems I may encounter, or a line of code that can achieve this efficiently? Any recommendations, suggestions, or advice is greatly appreciated. I’m certain this will help more people win they have a drive failure.

2
  1. Read careful the guide about how to restore your dead node
  2. To have a copy of your drive, in case of failure:
    a. Use a hardware RAID with 2 or 3 disks, that data is written on all of them in the same time with parity control.
    b. Make a clone, disk to disk (best to use is Acronis disk clone imager), but you will need to shut down your node, connect those 2 disks in another PC, do the cloning (will take time) and put it back. The time was offline, it will have to resync latest blocks. You will have to keep also an updated copy of your wallet.db and channel.db, taken offline. Otherwise all your copies are worthless.

So as you can see, is not easy and in special with a RPi will never be achievable. You will need a good strong barebone/PC for this.
For a RPi node I strongly suggest to have a UPS battery that will keep it alive as much is possible.

3

Thank you for the prompt reply. It seems it’s best for me to run a linux disto that supports docker in a virtualization server. Am I correct to assume nodes with 200+ channels are using a similar setup mentioned above and not a RPi?

4

Yes. For more than 40 active channels with many routes txs, you should strongly consider a better hardware.

But you don’t need VM. Is enough a Debian OS (strongly recommended this one for a node) and just install requisites for Umbrel node (follow the instructions from Github Umbrel https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel#-installation and in 5 min you have it done.