Restoring Chia from backups

I have successfully reinstalled Windows, and installed Chia. However, I have 3 wallets, but just one mnemonic set. Is there a way to bring some files / folders from backups that have saved old fingerprints?

@Bones, @Voodoo maybe you know what do I need to do bring back?

If anyone else has any thoughts, please ask as I do not want to replot…UGGGG…TY al in advance! :slight_smile:

Anyway that you backed up your whole .chia and .chia_keys folders to a USB disk for CYA. Making copies of just some database files wont cut it some times. And if you have a harvester sometime you should let it completely sync up so you have another backup.

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We have .chia_keys from backups. It has just few lines there, and looks almost the same as the new one. Do you think that this file keeps copies of fingerprints?

We can do a fast try to check it.

I am helping Larry, but don’t know much about those files and locations.

We copied .chia_keys folder, but now it asks for a passphrase. On the previous installation the passphrase was never used.


The last file last_used_fingerprint has a wallet ID inside. I never had more than one wallet. If one had two would there be two sets of numbers inside I dont know yet.

The db folders are on a separate drive, and all those wallet files are there. Also that last_used_fingerprint. So, looks like that is just one that was used the last time.

Yeah, checked that file, it has only one firngerprint.

The lastUsed_fingerprint shows the last used wallet. I made another wallet on my VMguest machine and now have two wallets. Which ever wallet gets used put that number in that file. But have found where the file is that knows about all the wallets.

Could you check your .chia_keys/keyring.yaml, whether you can see 2 fingerprints there? Although, looks to me that this file has only main credentials, and the fingerprints are stores somewhere else.

No it doesn’t show two.

When you first login and it askes you to pick a wallet if there are more than one, you can create a new wallet with the saved 24 word phase you got when you made the wallet. And hopefully you have someplace those 24 word phases for your wallets.

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Maybe I should have mentioned it earlier. Larry has 3 wallets. He doesn’t have saved mnemonics to 2 of those. His main wallet is the one that is receiving XCH from his pool. However, it looks that his plots are formatted with one of those two other wallets credentials. So, no XCH lost, just facing eventual replotting.

Thats not good, I think I put text files with most of this info on each chia machine just in case of booboo’s like this. The forgotten backup??? Put someplace…

He has both Win 7 and File History backups. However, MS depends on “proper” file locations to decide what is backed up (e.g., ProgramFiles / UserData). As Chia decided to invent new standards with their file / folders locations, it just makes harder to get everyone fully backed up.

Even after these latest install screwup it never changed the location of the .chia and .chia_keys under c:\users\root\ etc and in his config.yamml file he could have pointed to another location for his data base but the .chia and .chia_keys stays put in windows.

And I really thought this guy out of all these wing nuts would have had backups of his seed file names.

We have the old config.yaml and .chia_keys, but either something else is missing, or we don’t know how to bypass that initial passphrase.

When I install chia on another machine, before I run it, I copy the .chia and .chia_keys from another machine that was running to the new machine. I just copy the \ca folder to a temp spot and run .\chia.exe init -c \temp\ca and it creates new CA cert files. I never had the issue of it asking about a passphrase.

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Maybe that’s it.

@Lsherring we can try it tomorrow.

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Larry is back in business!

Looks like only .chia and .chia_keys are needed. Yesterday, Larry didn’t realize that at some point he did setup a box password. After few trials today, chia started as before seeing all three fingerprints, and thanks to that recognizing his plots.

Thank you @drhicom for helping out!

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You that super fixer!!!

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