Restoring lightning channels using mac

Hi -

My SSD recently died. Ive been trying to restore my node to its previous state. The initial block download is finished and bitcoin funds are available in the bitcoin wallet on dashboard. To restore lightning channels I originally tried using blixt on ios but no luck. I’ve also tried SSH into my umbrel on terminal using this command -
scp <path/to/your/channel/backup/file> umbrel@umbrel.local:/home/umbrel/umbrel/lnd/channel.backup

However umbrel doesnt like the file path I provided to the lightning back up file on the desktop of my Macbook.

I’m stuck and would really appreciate any help from anyone who has been in the same situation and resolved it.

Thanks

Hey jamie, just to double check - that command should be run from your terminal, not while you’re ssh’ed in. The command uploads the channel backup file TO your umbrel, so you don’t want to be logged in yet. Let me know if that helps.

If you are not so familiar with command lines, then just shut down your node, take the external drive and plug it into your Mac.
Browse to that folder
umbrel/umbrel/lnd
and copy the backup file (from your local desktop/PC/whatever folder you have it) and rename it to be channel.backup
That’s it.
Then run from SSH
cd ~/umbrel && ./bin/lncli restorechanbackup --multi_file /data/.lnd/channel.backup

After you run this, wait for 1 minute. You should now be able to see your channels being closed on http://umbrel.local/lightning .

You should wait patiently until the funds are coming back to your onchain wallet. It will take at least 40 blocks. You can see/check the details of closing channels in the troubleshooting guide

How to mount and read ext4 partitions in Mac

I tried running the command from terminal again whilst being not logged in to umbrel on my browser and it still wouldnt upload the backup file to my umbrel!

THANK YOU!!! I can see the channel closing now in the lightning section of my umbrel dashboard. In the end I had to make an Oracle VM of Linux Ubuntu on a windows machine to be able to drag and drop my backup file to the SSD and then run your command. I really hope Umbrel in the future builds something into their OS where I can just upload the backup file to the lightning part of the dashboard through my browser - it would make the restore process for lightning so much easier…

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