trying to restore after fresh install of Debian

Posted by marke

So Tom AI suggested posting on Demox. After fighting a damaged debian install on my 230gb ssd drive that failed to boot or repair grub after a power outage. i installed a new install of debian on a 2tb drive, reinstalled tomssparkbox to 2 tb drive. traying to run a restore from previous backup but it says it fails decryption. now toms AI says may not be restorable? AI response was "I;m not confident I can get you further without knowing whether this is the same install that made the backup or a fresh one. Click "Share to demox" below and give Tom the details — this smells like it could tie back to that plaintext-backup bug and he'll want to look at the actual file" .

1 replies

Chris wrote:

Good news — your backup is almost certainly fine, and this is fixable. Backups are locked with a key that lives on the install that MADE them, in the settings file called .env in your SparkBox folder. Your fresh Debian created a brand-new key, so the restore can't unlock the old backup — but the original key is still sitting on your old 230GB drive. Plug that drive in, open /opt/sparkbox/.env on it, and copy the line starting with SBBACKUPKEY (if there isn't one, SBSESSIONSECRET). Put that exact line into the same file on your new install, run sudo sparkbox up, then try the restore again. Flagged with Tom too — he'll want to hear how it goes.