Asked by @robinos. How much money do I need to send to my wallet to start hosting ?

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-roadmap

Thanks,
-Elvis

We are introducing a new, ongoing roadmap for Sia. It's a public Trello board listing all of our current activities and future planned activities. You can also vote for your favorite cards/tasks. Check it out here: https://trello.com/b/Io1dDyuI/sia-public-roadmap

Recent Development

The past few months have been very busy for Sia. One of our biggest accomplishments was the release of v1.1.0 and v1.1.1, which each provided substantial speedups to uploads and downloads on the renter. We have also released a competitive website https://rankings.sia.tech - a just-for-fun place to show off how much you have uploaded.

The new uploading code was so efficient that many of our hosts have hit full capacity, and this has resulted in a new type slowdown. Renters who are newly forming contracts know to avoid hosts without much available storage, but renters who have already formed contracts do not currently recognize that they need to form new ones when their hosts are full. Our next major set of upgrades for the renter is going to be focusing on host selection, and making sure that the renter is continuously making sure it has the best possible selection of hosts. This will also help with the occasional download issues that users are seeing.

Upcoming Development

Below is the list of things that we'll be working on over the next 4-8 weeks.

Instant Wallet Unlocking

We've promised instant wallet unlocking a few times, but we're finally finishing and releasing instant wallet unlocking. @nemo is currently fully focused on finishing the upgrades that we need, and then we will be able to release v.1.2.0 with instant wallet unlocking. The instant wallet unlocking code will also enable us to reduce the memory usage of Sia by about 500 MB.

Beyond instant wallet unlocking, the wallet will also be upgraded to allow loading from a wallet seed without needing to restart Sia, and will also now find all coins. The current version does not always find all of the coins, we've had to help people make manual adjustments to their configs to get everything working. That will no longer be needed with the new wallet code.

Host Performance and Reliability Upgrade

Unfortunately, hosts have not been correctly submitting storage proofs. v1.1.2 will have a hotfix for two of the issues relating to hosts incorrectly handling their storage contracts and this should resolve 90% of the problems. The other 10% will be resolved through upgraded monitoring and testing that will be launched in v1.2.0.

There is a second host bug where Windows hosts will occasionally corrupt and lose all of their contracts following a power failure. The fix is unfortunately more substantial, and will not be ready until v1.2.0.

v1.2.0 will see substantial changes to the host, particularly to the file management. In addition to fixing the corruption bug, the host will have greatly improved performance and scalability, and Windows users will no longer need to run their hosts as the admin user (Linux and Mac users already do not need to run their hosts as admin).

The upgrade from v1.1.1 to v1.2.0 for hosts could take a while. If you have hundreds of GBs on your host, the upgrade could even take a few hours. While unfortunate, it should be the most expensive upgrade for a long time, and it is well worth it. The new host code is much faster, much more scalable, much more reliable, and overall better for your filesystem.

Renter Performance Upgrade

We are always continuously monitoring renter performance, and right now the biggest problem is clearly host quality. When hosts fill up with storage, or get overwhelmed with bandwidth requests, the renter is not very good about identifying that the host has lost quality and needs to be replaced. Our next major upgrade for the renter is therefore ongoing monitoring of host quality, and making sure that new hosts are brought in to replace faulty hosts.

This should help a lot, both with performance and with file reliability.

Proof of Burn

Related to host quality and host performance, we will be adding proof of burn to Sia, likely in v1.2.0. The proof of burn will close the final major security gap in the Sia code, more or less 'completing' the core design for the storage protocol. There is of course much to do beyond that in terms of performance and features, but Sia's base will essentially be complete.

When the feature is released, we will also release an updated hosting guide explaining the proof-of-burn process.

File Sharing

File sharing will probably not be in v1.2.0. But it may be in v1.2.1 or v1.2.2, and it's something we're very excited to be bringing back to the community. The file sharing we will be adding today will be a simplified type of sharing, where all that is traded is the .sia files. If the receiver of the file is already connected to enough hosts to download the file, then the file can just be downloaded without hassle. Otherwise, the receiver will pick some of the cheaper hosts and form new file contracts with them, allowing them to download that file, and any future files they receive that are shard on that host.

Those file contracts that get created will not be used for uploading, only for downloading. They will also not be renewed.

Improved File Recovery

Today, if your renter folder corrupts, you will more or less lose all of your files. The same code that enables file sharing however will also enable file recovery (essentially you can share your files with yourself). You will be able to create a backup of all your Sia files, and if something goes wrong and you lose your renter directory, you will have a few weeks (4-6) to re-download your files and get them back. While this is not as good as being able to recover your files using just a seed, it is a significant improvement to losing everything. Furthermore, it means you can back up multiple TBs of data using a usb stick that's just a few GBs.

This is of course not the end of the improvements, as time continues we will make it increasingly easy to recover your files in the event of disaster.

Auto-Repair

I am almost embarrassed that things are still this way, but currently on Sia if you delete the file locally, the redundancy will constantly degrade, and performance can also suffer substantially. So largely, you need to keep your files locally even as you upload them to Sia.

Either v1.2.1 or v1.2.2 will have an upgrade to fix this. You will be able to delete your files locally once they are uploaded beyond 1.5x redundancy, and Sia will be able to keep them safely online after that.

That's all the time I have for today, however I hope to make a follow up post with some updates on our long term mission and our business developments at some point soon. In short, our long term mission remains to replace all existing centralized cloud storage solutions and CDNs, and our business development is going well.

I bought 479,780 Sia coins.

I have sent 1000 Sc to my offline wallet on 2017-02-25 via poloniex. but it did't appear in my offline wallet (Sia-UI-v1.1.0-win32-x64) . I want to store my 479,780 SC safely so what should i do ?

are there any suggestions to secure my sia coins for long time?

thank you

Ok so I sent like $5 worth of Siacoin to my Wallet program on windows, and im STILL sycnrhonizing at 30,078, and everytiem i try to start Sia it says Siad has stopped, i click "Start Sia and i might get to the login screen but within SECONDS it disconnects and brings me BACK to that Siad has stoppeed" and it only sometimes says NOT synchronizing but usually it does say "Synchronizing" like its been for days with no change....its been STUCK at 30,078 for days now, wtf?!?! I would hate to have to start asking how you are gonna pay me back my more than 30,000 sia coins ..they better not be stuck!!!! I swear to god this is making me mad why would you release software that doesnt work?!?! I sent these coins from a trading exchange wallet to my Sia coin wallet program and now its not working?! Im glad i didnbt actually invest6 a large amount oif money into this coin..i had high hopes for it and even marketed for it on steemit trying to put it up there with StorJ Coin but i see now it is nowhere near as nifty and useful and WORKING as StorJ coin...how can anyone use something this slow?! i want Siacoin to WORK! But hoiw can anyone use this thing for CLOUD storage for F*** sake when it doesnt even let me login and use it as a cryptocurrency walllet?!?!

Why would you people let me send thousands of sia coins over to this windows program wallet app , after AFTER i wanted to try the program out and CONTRIBUTE i wante dto HOST my free space and high banmdwidtch connect to peopel for sia coins! And you said i needed at least 30,000 sia coins to start that process and then once i transfer them over, I all of the sudden cant even login to this wallet?! Very sketchy..whats going on? Why did you make a program that lets me send it money and then once i send the money i cant even get in and it freezes at 30,0078? And i have people saying it happened to them on reddit and other websites but they eventually got in, it just took a while to catch up with the blockchain, they sauid a few months ago it went up to 70,000 ands now its probobly over 100,000 and im STUCK at 30,0078 WHY is that?

Please help! Its been stuck "synchronizing" at 30,078 for days now!

Sorry for m`y bad attitude its just that those sia coins were the only money i hadleft and now they feel like theyre gone because i cant even get into this programs wallet which is where i sent them ...so i cant uninstall it and reinstall or ill geta new wallet adress right? Whats going on why is it stuck at 30,078

please reimburse me the 30,000 sia coins i sll havent seen in my wallet that i sent to. I folowed your instructions, and i want my sia coins back sent to my exchange wallet adress..this is rediculous...i want answers, you better tell me that EVERYONE has been experiencing crazy delay`s too

I want to know that my sia coins are still accessible

Hi, on a win 10 machine running Sia-UI-v1.1.0-win32-x64 what is the best way to back up the wallet to another machine or thumb drive? According to this thread there was to be a button to do this, but I don't see it.

Thanks

I give this error after opening Sia-Ul and typing password wallet

after several minutes, first show me:
sia-ul wallet Error : connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.01:9980

After click on ok in this Error show:
ERROR FETCHING DATA :connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.01:9980

after click on ok in this error show :
Sia-UL Files ERROR :connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.01:9980

and finally show me : Sia is Stopped and again want password to access to wallet and this cycle is start again.

please guide me in detail,...... ,,thanks

Hi, So I unpacked the Sia-UI-v1.1.0-win32-x64 software on my win 10 pro machine that I run log on with as a non-admin user. I am able to successfully run the Sia GUI Wallet and sent some SC coins to the wallet that were received just fine so I closed the wallet GUI.

Hours later, however, I was not able to restart it. After looking in my task manager I noticed 8 sia Electron processes running and one siad.exe running. After ending all these tasks in task manager I was able to restart the wallet and see my coins in the wallet after ~5 minutes or so of syncing. Again after properly closing down the wallet I see all those Sia processes running.

Why are these processes not closing down upon exit, so i can restart the wallet problem free as needed?

Thanks

I stupidly pasted my seed somewhere I shouldn't have, and I want to move my coins to a new wallet with a new seed, i.e. I don't want somebody who knows my old seed to have access to my coins.

So running siac wallet init to create a new secure wallet + seed, then siac wallet load seed seems to import my old wallet into my new one, but as far as I'm aware anyone who has the old seed can also still do the same and spend my coins. I figure I need to send coin from my old address, to a new address which is under the new seed, but I'm struggling to work out how to do this from a single machine. The send command doesn't let me specify a 'from' address nor am I 100% certain my old seed can't be used to access my funds at the new address.

Please let me know the simplest way to get my funds under a new, uncompromised seed from a single machine.

Thanks

I have sent and then not received sia coin. The first was from poloniex. It just ended with an error status on their site. They got the coin back to me the next day. I sold it in to bitcoin and decided to just sell the BTC into shape shift to my wallet. I tried just a small amount. Miraculously it arrived in my wallet. So, I tried to send the rest of what I was trying to buy a little later through shapeshift. It never made it even though the shapeshift bar said complete. And for some reason, there was no transaction Id posted like usual. So, I am assuming they erorred out, just like at polo. I never have an issue with them and I am positive that they will refund me on Monday. The fact remains though, that I have no clue why I can't seem to get coin in to my wallet. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've actually had a similar problem with the new Monero GUI. Is there something I'm not understanding about these wallets. Thanks