Huzzah Peeps! I freakin did it! If you followed along, I had a virtual machine with Decred installed on it..that itself was installed onto a SSD hard drive with EXT4 full home directory encryption… I was messing around with settings, attempting in earnest to get the damn thing to load VNC server on boot…the screen on the laptop it’s housed in is broken (sort of the screen itself is okay but for some weird reason it flickers in and out and makes bunch of artifact colors…I have tried to replace the lcd flex ribbon cable to no recourse – it works if I hold pressure against it a certain way which leads me to think that there is a faulty component on the motherboard itself that has a crack in the solder).
So essentially I broke it one way or another and now that HDD would not allow me to decrypt it…at the time I tried to decrypt it and it would say the drive was empty. With the help of some kind badasses from #linux in irc we found where the .Private directory to be decrypted was located, “/media/frankenmint/{mountedHDDVolume}/home/.ecryptfs/frankenmint/“. From there it was an effortless “ecryptfs-recover-private .Private” with my passkey and viola my beautiful open bazaar database and perfectly preserved decred VM image as I left them…Immediately without hesitation I copied those files into an unencrypted location…I then made a copy of the unencrypted VM and have since migrated them onto this Macbook I am typing with…I hope to not need to spend it…for I’d like to see Decred become awesome and then use it at that point in the far future (we all hope!). I was very upset before as you could read, but thankfully with friends, we got my coin back! I was very lucky but others may not be in the future.
Take it from me, MAKE BACKUPS of your recovery seeds! I could have just had that and cared less about the other stuff (admittedly I’m happy I got back the source code file for the bitcoin flowchart and the open bazaar db, but those are minuscule compared to 200 or so airdrop Decred that was almost lost here 🤑) Have you lost money from data loss and/or theft? Let’s talk about it in the comments below.
