Wallet and File Recovery Walk-through
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Is there an existing walk-through to back up my Sia Wallet Balance and (most importantly) my File Recovery Seed?
I want to be sure that I can recover my Sia files and balance should my Sia client need to be reinstalled.
I've seen mention of backing up the Sia "meta-data". I assume just backing up my Sia data folder (%user%\AppData\Roaming\Sia-UI*) would cover that?
PS: I see that "Seed-Based File Recovery" is planned in the next 2 years (roadmap below). Any chance that can be moved up in priority?
Sia Roadmap: https://trello.com/b/Io1dDyuI/sia-public-roadmapThanks,
-Elvis
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Seed based file recovery is going to take a lot of code. Furthermore, that's the type of feature that you'd want to add once Sia is a proven-reliable means of backing up data. There's a lot of just general reliability stuff that I want to get completed before we take that step, especially because it's going to be so much work.
It's not a full two years though, it's just not going to happen in the next 6 months. I think 9-15 is probably more reasonable.
Right now to recover a wallet seed, you have to use siac:
siac wallet load seed, which you can put into the terminal plugin of the UI. Then it'll walk you through the rest. After you load the seed, you must restart Sia. Then in 95% of the cases, you will see all of your money.For the remaining 5% of cases, it's best at this point to sit tight for a few weeks and wait for v1.2.0. In v1.2.0 the UI will just have a 'load seed' button, and it'll do everything without needing a restart, and it'll find all the money 99.99% of the time instead of 95% of the time.
For file recovery in the event of losing the home machine: if you have just the .sia files backed up, you can message us and we can write code to help you get the data back. Unfortunately, that's about all you can do at this point. We are very aware that this is not sufficient, and will be pushing out an update to make file recovery easier in the next few months. It's just a wart of us being a new platform.
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One thing that would help, is some sort of wallet export/import, so you can at some intervals export you wallet copy it to a safer location.
I guess you can do this kind of as of now, by.
- stopping siad
- create an archive of the siad dir except consensus folder
- start siad
- unlock wallet.
This is inconvineient, If it was possible to do an export while running siad, that would be an improvement in this regard.
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@Taek - Thank you for the detailed reply! I'll look forward to seed-based file recovery :)
I tried the command you mentioned, restarted Sia, but didn't see the balance change. It was a small balance, so I'm not too worried.
Fortunately, I had a copy of my "wallet" data folder. I shutdown Sia, replaced the existing "wallet" folder with my backup, and then started Sia with my original wallet password. Hey, there's my balance!
Cool, good to know you can help recover ".sia" files if needed!
I'm going to do some further testing, but so far it seems that copying the Wallet folder, Renter folder, and Wallet password are sufficient to recover my files and balance on another machine.
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@brisk - Yes, that's what I have been doing for backups so far. Agreed, a GUI backup feature in the Sai client would be neat! Sounds like the dev team is working on it.
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Hello, If I understood, we need the wallet data folder and the password to recover our siacoin. I want to save my siacoin for the long term.
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you only need the seed/passwd to recover sia coins.
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