And yes, you don't unlock until the database is caught up and the balance will still read zero until you unlock. This is more of a feature than a bug if I understand correctly.
"feature" -> it was designed to work that way, but enough people have complained about it that we're going to make it display the correct balance even before you unlock. This isn't going to be ready by 0.4.4, but hopefully not long after.
Hi so I downloaded the new 0.4.3 version (says 0.4.2UI) and imported my legacy wallet from a much older version I think it was 0.3.3 or something. About how long should it take for my balance to appear?
Also, once my balance appears do I only need to remember the long lists of words that the Sia wallet gave me when I first opened it? I no longer need to keep any backups? Or any of the backups from the 0.3.3 wallets I was keeping until people would stop losing their coins?
Thanks!
Balance should appear once the blockchain is caught up. Legacy wallets don't always work, but if the balance was appearing in the legacy client then it will also appear in the new client.
You should always keep your old backups
. That long list of words is called the 'seed'. When you import a legacy wallet, it
does not move the coins to a seed-based address -> need to keep a backup of the wallet file. As you use the wallet more, the coins will slowly be cycled onto a seed address, though it's a pretty random process. Definitely best to keep the backups somewhere safe. (Alternatively, you can just send all of your coins to a seed-based address, that will work just fine)
For the backup you are talking about is writing down all the words enough? Or is there a wallet.dat file we should be backing up to? I've lost track of all the different versions of sia that save the wallet.backup and the wallet.dat in different places. And do we need both or is just one of them sufficient?
I think a guide on how to upgrade to new wallets without losing your coins would be really helpful especially to new users. I now have multiple different backups in different location which makes things different.
And the gateway host and renter folders in my home folder, are the still necessary? Or where they part of the old 0.3.3 system? Thanks for all the help!
Keep all your folders, you still need them. It's best to keep a backup of the wallet.json as well. The wallet still has some rough spots in it as far as user experience goes, but so far everybody who has thought that they lost coins using the 0.4.x wallets has been able to recover them. We've had 4-5 people report that their coins were gone, but every time we were able to find them. Obviously, it's better that you never need to go searching for them in the first place, we have a few improvements in the pipeline that will help (but still probably 3-5 weeks away).
Or releases should be less frequent and instead new versions should only come out after being bug tested so things like this don't keep on happening to users repeatedly. When sia was first released on poloniex I couldn't even move my coins becuase the mac wallet wasn't working and kept giving me errors on that no passphrase was appearing.
We do need better testing procedures. Less frequent releases is actually damaging though: we are changing/upgrading Sia at the same speed no matter how often we make releases. If we go a long time without making a release, we end up changing too many things and people get confused about how to use the new wallet. Also, the number of bugs we missed during testing is much higher, so the experience is both buggier and more confusing.
Rapid release cycles have been proven repeatedly to be the best way to develop software. We are also upgrading our testing process and improving the number of tests every release. Currently we have 450 tests that we run every release.
Also, where is the documentation for like command line options n stuff?
when using the command line tools, you'll find `--help` to be very useful. A lot of commands have subcommands, you can run things like `siac wallet --help` to get wallet specific help. And `siac wallet send --help` to get help specific to sending money around.
If you stop siad I don't think you'll have to reanounce but I'm not certain.
If you change price/size parameters you do not have to re announce, that I know for sure.
Unlocked status... I don't know for certain but I want to say it has to be unlocked, otherwise the contract wouldn't have an address to pay to.
No need to reannounce after stopping siad.
Siad needs to be unlocked for hosting to work.
