Restoring from your seed phrase pulls your VTXOs back from the Ark server and recovers your on-chain balance with a chain scan.You need:
Your 12-word seed phrase.
A wallet app on the same network and Ark server as the original.
Only restore a seed phrase whose original wallet is gone: two live wallets on the same seed drift apart, which can cause permanent loss of bitcoin.
1
Open the welcome screen
Open the wallet app. If it holds no wallet yet, it opens on the welcome screen, and you can go straight to the next step.If the dashboard opens instead, the wallet app already holds a wallet, and you must delete that wallet before you can restore your old one. Go to Settings > Danger zone > Delete wallet and select Delete in the dialog. The wallet app returns to the welcome screen.
Deleting a wallet destroys any bitcoin it still holds. Check the balance first, and if it isn’t empty, send the bitcoin out or write down that wallet’s seed phrase before deleting.
2
Select Import existing wallet
On the welcome screen, select Import existing wallet.
Import existing wallet opens on the Wallet name step
3
Name the wallet
Enter a display name (it doesn’t affect recovery) and select Continue.
4
Enter your seed phrase
Type your 12 words in order; each field autocompletes as you type. You can also paste the whole seed phrase into the first field, and the wallet app fills in the rest. Select Continue.A word the wallet app doesn’t recognize turns its field red: check it against the words you wrote down. If the wallet app accepts all 12 words but still reports an invalid seed phrase, check their order.
Each field autocompletes as you type
5
Confirm the network and servers
The wallet app shows the network, Ark server, and chain source, which you can’t change here; check that they match your original wallet. The birthday height is optional and not used with the default chain source, so leave it blank. Select Continue to finish.
On a self-hosted install that uses Bitcoin Core as its chain source, the wallet app requires a birthday height. If you don’t know it, enter a block height you’re sure is earlier than the wallet’s creation: a lower height only makes the scan take longer.
The wallet app scans the chain for your on-chain balance and pulls your live VTXOs back from the Ark server to rebuild your off-chain balance, then opens the dashboard. This can take a moment.
There’s no mature continuous backup solution for Bark Wallet on Umbrel yet; we’ll update this section when that changes.If you kept umbrelOS backups, you can try restoring your latest one: your wallet directory comes back as it was when that backup was taken.
If your wallet has changed since the backup was taken, you may need to restore from your seed phrase, which relies on the Ark server.
To restore from a continuous backup, follow Start9’s official guide for restoring an individual service.If you need to restore onto a new Start9 device, follow the initial setup guide and select Restore From Backup. Server-level backups don’t include your wallet data. They carry a pointer instead, made up of your seed phrase and your backup-target credentials. After the restore, the service pulls the freshest wallet snapshot from your backup targets automatically, bringing back your balance and payment history.If no target is reachable, the service falls back to a seed phrase recovery, which relies on the Ark server.
There’s no mature continuous backup solution for self-hosted installs yet, so restore depends on what you set up; we’ll update this section when that changes.If you were using bark-backupd, stop the wallet app and run bark-backupd restore before starting it again. If you were replicating with Litestream, run litestream restore to put your latest copy back in the wallet data volume before starting the stack.
If your wallet has changed since the backup was taken, you may need to restore from your seed phrase, which relies on the Ark server.
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