I had Sats I forgot on a Lightning Network Wallet I wanted to try. That wallet doesn’t use BIP39 and I didn’t do the backup right.
Updated phone, bitcoin lost.
I can’t recommend non BIP39 wallets, recipe for disaster.
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Lightning wallets can use a seed phrase for on-chain funds but they need an alternate approach for money tied up in channels.
lnd has support for Static Channel Backups (SCBs) where you can back up channel.backup and use that to sweep all your funds to your on-chain wallet.
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I think Static Channel Backups (SCBs) are entirely specific to lnd but most Lightning wallets are using lnd so they should be supporting it. User friendly ones should be getting you to back those up and actively discouraging you from backing up the database as a whole instead.
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There's documentation at github.com/lightningnetwo.
I'm unsure about whether the issue mentioned in the "Recovering Using SCBs" section is resolved where it appears that it was / is required to reconnect to your peers in order to recover the funds with a planned solution for it.
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Doesn’t need to be that hard:
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It definitely makes sense for SCB backups to be automated. You probably want them backed up in multiple places. It appears that they fixed the issue where you need to connect to your peers to recover funds via SCBs but it's not mandatory yet:
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A user-facing wallet can automate all of it. Backing up the whole database requires shutting down lnd first and then the backup is unsafe once you've started up lnd again. It'd be unsafe if the wallet wasn't using SCBs under the hood. I'd be scared of wallets doing this wrong.
Not all wallets use lnd. Each implementation does state backup very differently.
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c-lightning doesn't appear to offer static channel backups:
lightning.readthedocs.io/BACKUP.html
The best approach they offer there is setting up synchronous PostgreSQL replication.
Is there an alternative to lnd SCBs which works properly? SCB approach should probably just be standardized.
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