Channel Backup confidential? + force closing channels

General Discussions
1

Hi, I’m pretty new but can’t find the answer to the following 2 questions:

  1. is the channel backup file confidential/does it contain any confidential information? Is this something i need to store encrypted or is it fine laying around because one needs the seed to do something malicious?

  2. I opened a small channel and closed it the day after via the „close channel“ in umbrel. Was this a force close and seen as bad practice or smthing like that? Not sure if closing a channel like that is fine or seen as a force close. I want to be a good player :slight_smile:

Thanks!

Edit: ah! I see in thunderhub that the closing was „cooperative“. But I can’t influence how the closing is done, right?

2

  1. The static channel backup is required to force/coperative close your channels and recover your funds. And yes It requires for the node to be restored using your seed phrase or master key. The backups themselves are encrypted using a key derived from the user’s seed. See: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/master/docs/recovery.md

  2. Force close is when one of the peers in the channel is offline. Cooperative close is when both of them are online.

3

Awesome, thank you. So no need to additionally protect the backup file :slight_smile:

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