I experienced an external hard disk failure while I was re-installing my operating system (Debian stable) after a stupid problem I think I caused. Anyhow, I didn’t have off-site backups of my Bisq data directory; only had them on the external hard disk that failed. There’s a slight chance I might be able to find someone who can help me read the data off the disk, but my efforts I wasn’t able to recover any of the lost data.
Given that bisq is a peer-to-peer software, is there any way I can recover my trade history if I still have the bisq Trade IDs? Or is that data simply gone (assuming I can’t recover it from the failed disk)?
Unfortunately, I greatly doubt that the data is recoverable from the P2P network. Maybe Manfred could be more precise, but I’m doubtful about good news.
Personnaly I recommand to use USB keys. Cheap, practical, and using several keys, you’re quite safe.
Are you worried about your account’s age, or you’re mainly concerned about the history ?
Its the trade history I’m interested in. I think I have most of it, but I’m wanting to make sure my records are correct.
As I understand, the seed words will let me restore the wallet, but it won’t include the bisq data. I suspect you’re probably correct that there’s no way to restore the data from a P2P network.
No there is no way to recover your trade history. The only data shared is the trade statistics but there is no identifying data for privacy reasons (only trade data, amount price, currency,…).
If you restore from seed words, use that only to withdraw the funds but not for trading as the wallet will not be in a consistent state. You have to start over then again with a new data directory. Hope you did not had open trades or disputes as you would not be reachable anymore. If so let the arbitrators know, so they react accordingly. Open offers are lost but the reserved funds are accessible at restore from seed words.
No open offers or disputes, that I’m aware of. I’ve actually been using another data directory for some months, and its just now that I’m trying to see what I can do to reconstruct those records.
Fortunately, I think that I have the amounts of BTC I sold and EUR I received for my trades during that period. Hopefully with that and the wallet data I can find the bitcoint txIDs to figure out what I paid in mining and bisq network fees. I think that’s the only data I’ve got to hunt down.
Needless to say, I’m backing up my data directory regularly now!