[ale] Help with data recovery

Mon Aug 24 13:42:21 EDT 2020

This story hurts.  I think you're right about asking on this list, though.
Lots of experienced people here.  I'm not familiar with Deja Dup, but I
think many cryptographic key paradigms require two keys.  A personal or
private key, and a public key (a remote key).  When you encrypt for someone
else, you use their remote (public) key to encrypt it, and they decrypt it
with their private key.  And vice versa--a remote party encrypts a
message/data for you with your public key, which you decrypt with your
private key. (I'm thinking of GPG/PGP here....)

So I'm guessing the private key was in the home directory somewhere.  But,
wait, if Deja Dup didn't have access to the private key before the
decryption process, how would it decrypt the data?  Wouldn't that require
that the private key was accessible before the decryption, so therefore the
private key was stored somewhere else on the hard drive?  Err, which is
gone now?  I would re-read the Deja Dup manual and hopefully find out where
that private key gets stored, or maybe even backed up remotely at
dejadup.com or something?  Or does Deja Dup not use two keys but only one?
Might be useful to find out.  Maybe search "data recovery" at dejadup.com
or something?

All that said, I could see encrypting a partition on a device that contains
sensitive data as well as is easily stolen, such as a laptop or something.
But even so, encryption is so powerful that I probably would only use it on
smaller segments of data that wouldn't affect the system as a whole.

All the best to you, Jim.  I hate it when "tech learning" becomes this
painful!

On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 10:49 PM Jim Ransone via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> I tried the password and it acted busy for a little while and then asked
> for the password again. Not sure what that means. I guess if I can figure
> out the commands and try it in the terminal, maybe it would give me an
> error message, which would be less mysterious.
>
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 10:26 PM Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If you are super lucky, the old password might actually work.
>>
>> On August 21, 2020 9:05:40 PM EDT, Jim Ransone via Ale <ale at ale.org>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Bummer. As I said, I am not very tech savvy. I really don't even
>>> understand encryption. This Deja Dup backup software was widely recommended
>>> and encrypting all the files was the default. I didn't know enough to even
>>> question this. Now I realize how stupid that was. They put warnings on
>>> plastic bags so people don't suffocate themselves. You'd think they might
>>> put a warning on software that encrypts all your data.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 8:37 PM SpaXpert, Inc. <spaxpert at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> 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
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Ale mailing list
>>>>> Ale at ale.org
>>>>> https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>>>>> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>>>>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>>>>>
>>>>
>> --
>> "no government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to
>> inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy
>> managed in the interests of the few.” - John Dewey
>>
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