I still haven't been able to restore access to my own lightning node and sats that went down in ~May 2023. Copying/pasting whole LND directory with original seed on new node didnt do the trick. Experience felt like rugpull technology.
Discussion
Yeah, I definitely recognize that running a lightning server is tricky. Especially based on the way that lightning is structured. Luckily I didn't have a lot of sats on them but when I was running Umbrel I definitely lost some sats to lightning for having a node nuke.
I am meticulous in an extreme about my backups nowadays.
ah! yeah that sucks. It seems LND need the seed pharse PLUS the channel data. In order for the restore. https://github.com/fort-nix/nix-bitcoin/blob/4e5c5dfe9bdc05ba4b4d79dfa766a182ded0a3d3/examples/configuration.nix#L99
And unfortunately, if channel data is out of date, you risk taking a penalty transaction.