PC Crashed - Bye Bye Node?

A little over a week ago, my house lost power and Windows crashed and would not reboot. I reinstalled Windows on another hard drive while leaving the hdd with my storj node alone (not setup files, just the location of storage for the node that is on a separate drive). Am I able to bring the node back online if I reinstall storj on the fresh copy of Windows? Or is it not possible and I should format the separate drive of anything storj related? I still have my original Windows ssd that won’t boot but I can access the files if they would get the node back up.

Thanks for the help!! Sad that it might be the end after years even though I hardly “made” anything, but enjoyed learning years ago during a sad time :slight_smile:

Welcome to the forum @jeremyd130 !

Your node needs its “data” and “identity” to survive any failures. As long as you have both of them, you can reinstall Windows countless times. You should also keep identity on the same drive as the node’s “data”.

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Thanks!! Is the identity info on the old windows hard drive that I need to pull over to the new one?

Its the folder that was created when you gave the identity create storagenode command. On Windows, its usually C:\Users\<your Windows username>\AppData\Roaming\Storj\Identity\storagenode, unless you gave a custom path while creating the identity.

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I was able to pull that entire identity folder thankfully and actually started doing the setup again without issue…until constantly getting the error message “There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your support personal or package vendor”.

I saved everything on the drive with the storj data (I cannot open the folder itself) but don’t believe I’m doing this correctly where it seems like I shouldn’t be asked for the size of the storage space again. This is what the text file shows on the drive:

2025-05-02T15:43:54-04:00 INFO Configuration loaded {Process: storagenode, Location: D:\config.yaml}
2025-05-02T15:43:54-04:00 INFO Anonymized tracing enabled {Process: storagenode}
2025-05-02T15:43:54-04:00 FATAL Unrecoverable error {Process: storagenode, error: storagenode configuration already exists (D:\)}

Backup or rename your default install dir: Program Files\Storj. Ensure you have a backup of your identity info. Uninstall Storj.. Reinstall with whatever info necessary, then stop the new service. Overwrite your Storj dir with proper backup in/files (or rename the default, and rename your copied directory back to Storj)
Of course ensure all config links/dirs in the config.yaml are accurate. re-start service.
You probably will have to also stop the default updater, so your backup files can replace that .exe also.
2 cents, Good luck
Julio

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I can’t actually install the program itself so there isn’t a service for me to stop or program to uninstall. I’m not sure if there is a step I’m missing to properly point the install file to the current 3TB of storj data on the hdd (the identity backup folder is also on the hdd and has 4 cert files and 2 key files).

Rename the config.yaml file in D drive to config.yaml.bak then try installing the program.

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Thanks. I tried but still received the same message. If I’m still using the same 3TB of data (4TB total size of drive), should the setup ask me the same question about what the allocation size is?


Yes because all of these answers will be part of your config.yaml file.

Try renaming the Storj folder from “Program files” in C drive if you see it and install it again. If you get any errors then post a screenshot of it.

Same error message (I straight deleted the storj folder in program files and restarted the installation)

2025-05-05T09:18:46-04:00 INFO Anonymized tracing enabled {Process: storagenode}
2025-05-05T09:18:46-04:00 FATAL Unrecoverable error {Process: storagenode, error: open D:\Storj\trash\.trash-uses-day-dirs-indicator: The file exists.}

Rename the file .trash-uses-day-dirs-indicator to .trash-uses-day-dirs-indicator.bak and try again.