[ale] Help with data recovery

[Jim Ransone]

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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