Failure Recovery

Overview

Failure recovery applies to many operational events, including wallet service outages, rejected signatures, stale data, interrupted sweeps, failed broadcasts, delayed confirmations, database errors, or incomplete ledger updates. The correct response depends on where the process stopped and what external effects already occurred.

Retrying blindly is dangerous because a transaction may have succeeded externally even when the local system missed the response. Recovery therefore needs durable identifiers, idempotent operations, state inspection, and reconciliation against authoritative sources. Some failures require compensation or manual review rather than repetition.

Teams should define failure states, detection signals, retry limits, escalation, rollback or forward-recovery actions, and evidence retention. Recovery procedures should preserve original intent and prevent double spending, duplicate payout, or hidden balance differences. Metrics should separate recovered events from unresolved or customer-impacting failures.

A controlled Failure Recovery process moves through detection, containment, claimant verification, approval, restoration, validation, credential or guardian replacement, reconciliation, and closure. For Failure Recovery, emergency access should be time-limited and should not silently weaken the authorization policy used during normal operation.

Evidence for Failure Recovery should preserve incident time, affected identifiers, last known state, claimant and approver checks, backup or share version, actions performed, credentials revoked, assets verified, discrepancies found, and final owner acceptance. For Failure Recovery, sensitive recovery material must not appear in the incident record.

For Failure Recovery, important risks include fraudulent recovery requests, guardian collusion, unavailable shares, outdated backups, compromised cloud accounts, missing derivation metadata, untested procedures, and simultaneous loss of primary and backup systems. For Failure Recovery, independent storage and periodic exercises reduce correlated failure but introduce their own custody obligations.