3. Power Cut killed a Json file. Any ideas???

Power Cut killed a Json file. Any ideas???

  • S

    Hi again all, let me start by saying that as new as these technologies are, I would consider myself to be reasonably competent, I've dabbled with many for a while. I've just had really bad luck with Sia. They all seem great, new and exciting. However I would love some help with some of the finer details of Sia because it's now just becoming a pain in the ***. One problem after another.

    So with everything running great, recently we had a thunder storm, and the flickering power was enough to make my pc restart. Killing Sia in the process.

    I have read other posts explaining that this is a windows induced corruption of a Json file. Fine. So I replicated what another user had done and deleted some of them from \Sia folder under the headings \consensus, \gateway, \host, \miner, \renter, \transactionpool, etc

    This made Sia happy enough again to open, sync, rebuild the missing files and once again have access to my funds. Great.

    Except....

    Now under my GUI hosting tab it displays the number of active contracts, and my expected Sia from before the power cut... but at the bottom of the screen where the displayed storage drives are. It doesn't recognize the 9GB of files I'm holding and was hosting before the power cut, only the small 8mb contracts I acquired after I restored Sia.

    The files are still on the drive, so how do I manually point sia to them?

    Is Sia smart enough to know I still have the files when I get a download call for one of them? Am I still sending storage proofs for those files?

    I fear because it's all encrypted it's not even possible to correct this, has a power cut and corrupted hosting Json killed all my contracts?

    Please help, any shot in the dark is appreciated. I'm happy to really dig into lines of data in those files, that's what I'm expecting I'll need to do, just need to know where to dig.

    Dan

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  • S

    Wow that sounds complicated. I think in the future, Siacoin will become more stable with it's GUI Clients. I just started Siacoin, and the uploads are kind of slow. Do you know what the cause of this is?

    Thank you,

    Good Luck. :D

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  • D

    Yikes, power faults have a tendency to cause pretty bad issues. If its any consolation last I heard major overhauls are in the works to reduce these types of issues.

    As for your situation did you touch any of the .db files? Also what does your host/storagemanager/storagemanager.json and host/storagemanager/storagemanager.log files look like? Do your drives correctly in the .json file, and do you see any odd errors in the log file?

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  • S

    Hi and thanks for the quick reply, sorry I've been slow my end.

    In hindsight I could have handled it better, but also in my defense there is very little information on how to handle it correctly.
    I found a topic on this forum at the time in which a user "purged" all folders apart from the wallet, it worked.... I believed sia would rebuild. I understand now why the storagemanager data is important as by carrying out the "purge" I was able to start Sia and have access to my wallet funds, however I'm certain I've screwed up the contracts I've held beyond recovery by doing so. (I've tried data recovery software to dig them up). I have the physical storage files, but without the storagemanager I understand Sia has no link to them or their ownership. So...

    That's it for me though I'm afraid. With losing over 3k sia because it kept announcing itself whilst I was away on holiday, and another 4k because of a simple power cut (and my misunderstanding of how to fix it), I'm packing it in. I really thought sia would make it by being the first out of testing. Now i believe Sia is just not ready.

    I've certainly given it a good try. My biggest lesson though if anyone else wants to take something from my small but frustrating losses is that it's not just the seed that's important. I strongly suggest making regular backups of the folders \host and \renter if you use those features. I could have had it worse i guess, someone out there could have hundreds of thousands sc locked in collateral on contracts and loose it all due to corrupted files in their \host and \storagemanager folder.

    If there is a way to get the contracts back I'd love to hear from someone, and I'll keep sia running for another week or so, until then I'm off to poloniex to get rid of what I still have left.

    Dan

    And for your question droghio I cleared out the \storagemanager as part of the \host purge. Sia did rebuild and create new working files in these folders which allowed me to accept and run new contracts. .log files went with the old. The new one is obviously very short and appears normal, no issues. Thanks.

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  • admins

    Hi, thanks for taking the time to give us a shot. As you are saying, Sia is still experimental software. The 1.0 is a bit confusing because we are using sematic versioning - we've settled on the API and made a compatibility promise to our developers.

    Sia has protections against power loss, but currently there is definitely no way to recover your renter and host folders using just a wallet seed. In general, losing power should not cause you to lose your storage contracts or your renter files. I'm not sure what exactly went wrong on your machine, but Windows in general is much worse at providing safety against power-loss than Linux (there's not much we can do about that - Windows just doesn't support the operations you need to make it safe without also making it extremely slow).

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