[ale] Help with data recovery

[Jim Ransone]

Update: The restore process has completed. As far as I can tell, everything
was successfully decrypted, including the most recent incremental backups
from several days ago. It appears that Jim Kinney, you were right all
along. It was a matter of using the wrong password. Thanks to everyone who
offered advice! The last few days have been somewhat of a crash course that
forced me to get to a better understanding of some basics. All suggestions
were helpful!

Now I am on to the next can of worms. I was using Ubuntu Studio for the
pre-installed audio, video, and graphiç design software. It runs the Xfce
desktop environment. Apparently, they are moving to KDE Plasma on the next
LTS because it's better in some ways and the resource use is now comparably
low to Xfce. Apparently most of Ubuntu Studio's development team has gone
to installing Kubuntu on their own computers and adding all the extra
Ubuntu Studio stuff on top of Kubuntu with an installer designed for that
purpose.

So I have decided to go that route myself. Now I am trying to figure out
the best way to get Kubuntu with the Ubuntu Studio stuff and my old home
folder with all the config files back on my laptop. Anyone have any
thoughts on the best strategy for this? I have seen someone online suggest
that the best way is to get the home directory on a separate partition
FIRST and then installing the new OS in a different partition after that.
This makes sense to me. Apparently there are numerous posts that explain
how to do the partition thing.

Also, there is the issue that led me to reinstall the OS in the first
place: I had messed up my audio configuration and couldn't figure out how
to get sound back. So somehow I need to get all my email, browser, calendar
settings and cache back but not my audio settings, which I had totally
screwed up somehow.

Again, any advice is appreciated! And thanks to everyone for all the help
with my data recovery!!

Jim

On Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 6:58 PM Steve Litt via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 24 Aug 2020 16:19:39 -0400
> Jim Ransone via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>
>
> > This indicates to me that you are right, Bob. The password was the
> > password. There is no other key that's being created and stored
> > somewhere. It also would seem to indicate that the password is
> > somewhere on the backup drive, but I don't have any idea where on the
> > drive that would be.
>
> Assuming you're correct that the password is the one and only thing
> needed to unlock the backup, then try your remembered password, write
> down the error message, then try it with a known bad password (try
> "knownbadpassword") and see if the error message is different. If
> different, it's very likely you had the right password the first time
> and something else is going wrong. If the error message is the same,
> it's probable the password isn't what you remember it.
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
> Autumn 2020 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/thrive
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