Restore Seed to new Umbrel installation

I have my seed and channel backup from a working Umbrel installation that I want to move to a new piece of hardware. I intended to do this by setting up a fresh instance of Umbrel on my new hardware and restoring my seed and channel backups to this installation. The problem I’m having is their is never an opportunity for me to restore my seed like there was in previous versions of Umbrel. Has restoring from seed been removed from the latest version? Is there a process that isn’t documented or that I just haven’t found?

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It’s kind of blowing my mind that a fundamental function of any Bitcoin system (restoring seed) seems to have been removed, and no matter where I ask about this I don’t even get a response. If I’m dong something wrong I’d love to be told how.

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Yeah, we better have the ability to use the mnemonic phrase we got to restore access. I am sure there’s a way.

I’m in the same boat. Since updating to 0.5.0 the lightning node app froze every time I tried to transfer funds. I tried to do a re-installation of the app by deleting and re-installing. It deleted the entire lnd folder with lnd.conf and lnd.conf.bak. I had a written copy and reproduced the files. Still can’t sync. Then I tried to uninstall again and reinstall, but instead of entering the new 24 word phrase, I entered the original. Won’t take the original. Have to reproduce lnd.conf again and try something else. I’m stumped.

I’m going to work under the assumption that restoring from seed has either been removed or it was just overlooked on this update, if that’s not the case someone please correct me.

With that being said, is there a process to manually restore the seed through command line? I know the seed is stored in the Umbrel folder but not sure all the places it’s referenced and what the process would look like to restore it and your channels from backup as the currently documented way doesn’t work.

Look here on your old node…

~/umbrel/app-data/lightning/data/lightning/state.json

Thanks but I need to restore the seed as well.

My understanding is that, unofficially, you just need to copy that file over to the new node (and reboot) in order to import the old seed.

Unless I’m misunderstanding the goal.

I misunderstood what you were suggesting, I thought this would only bring channel state, this would also bring over channels and on-chain wallet?

Good question. I’d doubt that file would bring back everything. I’ve not restored a node yet, but I believe the following are needed:

  • state.json
  • lnd.conf
  • channel.db (or channel.backup)
  • wallet.db

I’ll give that a shot, state.json just caused Lightning to never launch, I figured that wasn’t enough for it to work. Thanks for the suggestions

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Yeah, 0.5.0 also hosed my lnd channels. My numerous methods to restore from my backup file have failed.

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May I ask which files and/or methods you used?

I want to migrate to a beefier machine, and would love to minimize the number of attempts I make. :upside_down_face:

I tried some variations of method 1 from this How to restore your node wallet

I finally gave up and did the Blixt method which closed all my channels

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I THINK I recovered my channels using the process here.

They are now showing up in umbrel. I previously used the Blixt method to close my channels so I’m not really sure what state they are in but, progress anyway