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.
Restoring a Bark Wallet is currently not the most user-friendly process. A better restore UX is in the works.
1
Start with no wallet
If the app has never been opened, leave it that way and skip to Open the restore screen below.If you’ve already opened the app, it will have created a new wallet, and that wallet must be deleted before your old one can be restored. On the dashboard, confirm the new wallet is empty, then delete it under Settings > Danger zone > Delete wallet.
Deleting a wallet destroys any bitcoin it still holds. Check the balance first, and if it isn’t empty, send the bitcoin out or back up that wallet’s seed phrase before deleting.
2
Restart the wallet app
After a deletion, the wallet daemon can’t accept a new wallet until it restarts. First close every Bark Wallet browser tab (a tab left open recreates a wallet on its own), then restart:
Umbrel
Start9
Self-host
Right-click the Bark Wallet icon on your umbrelOS home screen and select Restart.
On the service’s Dashboard, select Stop, then Start.
From the repository directory, stop the wallet app and start it again:
Mainnet
Signet
docker compose --env-file .env.mainnet downdocker compose --env-file .env.mainnet up --build
npm run down:mainnetnpm run dev:mainnet
docker compose --env-file .env.signet downdocker compose --env-file .env.signet up --build
npm run down:signetnpm run dev:signet
3
Open the restore screen
The restore screen is at the wallet app’s own address, with /import added to the end.
Umbrel
Start9
Self-host
Go to http://umbrel.local:4004/import: the wallet app’s usual address, with /import added. Your Umbrel’s IP address works too, for example http://192.168.1.30:4004/import.
On the service’s Interfaces tab, copy the Web UI address without opening it, then go to that address with /import added to the end.
Go to http://localhost:5173/import.
Type the full address, including /import, before you press Enter. If you land on the app without it, the app creates a new wallet and you’re back to step 1.
The restore screen opens on the Wallet name step
4
Name the wallet
Enter a display name (it doesn’t affect recovery) and select Continue.
5
Enter your seed phrase
Type your 12 words in order. The fields autocomplete as you go.
6
Confirm the network and servers
The network and Ark server are shown read-only and must match your original wallet. The birthday height is optional; a block height from before the wallet’s first transaction speeds up the on-chain scan. Select Continue to finish.You’ll be taken to the dashboard. The wallet pulls your live VTXOs from the Ark server to rebuild your off-chain balance, and your on-chain balance appears once the chain scan completes.
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 choose 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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