[ale] Help with data recovery

[SpaXpert, Inc.]

Unfortunately, if you lost your encryption key, then you're likely in the
burnt toast department.  If you could find anyone to fix this situation
you'd probably owe them a million bucks.  I've been working with Linux for
over 25 years, and I'm definitely not the smartest ever, but it saves me
from the bots.  That said, I would never encrypt my data with a sole
encryption key that could be... never mind.

Sad advice... I have a separate usb hard drive that I drag and drop the
critical folders that I use for work occasionally.  That works for me, and
everything is unencrypted.  10 years ago I lost tons of family videos and
photos that I didn't backup due to a crappy hd controller on a crap
motherboard.  Never again.

I feel your pain.
Doug.

On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 8:19 PM Jim Ransone via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> I found this group when searching for a local computer repair place that
> works on Linux stuff. I am not a programmer or particularly tech savvy. I'm
> hoping I can get some advice here, be it a recommendation on somewhere I
> can go to pay someone to fix this, or tips on how to fix it myself.
>
> I did something that in retrospect seems completely boneheaded. I am
> running Ubuntu Studio 20.04 on my laptop and was backing up my data to an
> external hard drive using Deja Dup (which uses Duplicity.) I was trying to
> fix some audio issues and somehow screwed things up pretty badly, so I
> reinstalled Ubuntu Studio 20.04 hoping to take everything back to before
> the audio problems. The reinstall erased everything. When I went to restore
> my home folder from the backup, it's not working because of the encryption.
> From an old forum thread I found about a similar situation, I was clued in
> to the sad news that I probably erased the encryption key during the
> reinstall. Doh! Suggestions included using testdisk to recover the data on
> the laptop and manually restoring the encrypted files on the backup drive.
> The latter seems very complicated and mysterious.
>
> I might be in over my head trying to do this myself. Anyone know of anyone
> in the Atlanta area you would trust with a recovery job like this?
>
> Thanks in advance for any advice or recommendations!
>
> Jim
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