Where are my UA private keys?

[aarnott]

With zcashd 5.0.0, I created a few UAs. I then exported my wallet. I found a few new T and Z (sapling) addresses, but I didn’t see any U addresses nor mention of Orchard pool private keys.
Where are they? Are they based on the recovery phrase that’s included in that exported wallet file?
What would I do with the recovery phrase? I can’t find any way to provide a recovery phrase to zcashd to add addresses based on it to my wallet.

[dismad]

Here is a little more info:

Unified Addresses & Full-node RPC API

In the zcashd full node wallet, we expose Unified Addresses via “accounts”. An account corresponds to the set of spending keys that can spend the funds received by a Unified Address. Every account has a single Unified Full Viewing Key (1-to-1 mapping), and can also have multiple Unified Addresses (via the “diversified addresses” feature we introduced in Sapling and kept in Orchard). You create a new account with z_getnewaccount, which gives you the account number ACCOUNT (0 for the first accou…

[Autotunafish]

Currently I don’t think there is a method to import the seed directly

[aarnott]

Thanks. So at the moment, backing up the seed phrase is of course good, but in the event that I need to restore my wallet using it, I cannot do that yet? Interesting. And a bit unnerving.
Would just backing up my %appdata%\zcash\wallet.dat file be a more sure way to secure my funds then, since to restore I could just copy that file back over to the same location?

[str4d]

@aarnott

So at the moment, backing up the seed phrase is of course good, but in the event that I need to restore my wallet using it, I cannot do that yet?

Correct. The issue for making restoration-from-mnemonic possible (and figuring out how to handle the UX for it, which a full node with integrated wallet really doesn’t make nice) is Add ability to restore the zcashd wallet from the emergency recovery phrase (mnemonic seed). · Issue #5796 · zcash/zcash · GitHub.

@aarnott

Would just backing up my %appdata%\zcash\wallet.dat file be a more sure way to secure my funds then, since to restore I could just copy that file back over to the same location?

For a brand new wallet, either approach is equivalent, but you’re correct that having the wallet.dat around makes restoration possible with zcashd today.

For an old wallet with pre-UA keys, backing up wallet.dat is a requirement (and one that zcashd-wallet-tool takes care to point out), because the mnemonic can’t be used to recover things that weren’t generated from it. We did implement a hack to bind old Sapling keys to the mnemonic, but there was nothing that could be done for legacy transparent and Sprout which were never derived deterministically.