Hello. I’m a newbie here and need some advice from experienced and long-term users. I’ll do my best to explain the situation concisely.
In April 2022 I created a backup using restic 0.12.1 or 0.13.0 (Sorry, I do not remember exact version unfortunately)
To create a password I used my password manager and stored that password there (I checked the time of password generation really close to the time of key creation)
I can’t swear that this is what happened, because it happened too long ago. But I do remember that after the backup was finished, I checked the contents to make sure I could restore it.
Moved away
Right now, I finally managed to assemble storage and decided to restore my backup using restic 0.16.5
On any operation when I provide my password from password manager (both via prompt and password file) I got “wrong password or key not found”.
So I want to ask, what is the odds of
I somehow forgot what I used password not from the password manager
Some breaking change in restic which prevents the new version from accessing the master key using my password
I do not insist that there is a problem with the software. I am ready to accept the fact that I butchered my backup. But if there is a chance to recover, I’m prepared to invest more time int this.
Thank you for the suggestion. I was able to find the history of the password generator. However, it appears I did not update the generated password or generate a new one outside of that record. So, there is still hope I used one of my common passwords.
This is my plan for tomorrow (right now, the repository is copying from an external drive into an array). In 2022 I installed restic via Nix, so my plan to check history and get revision of nixpkgs and rebuild it from that revision.
I identified the version I used back in 2022. Thanks to Nix, I successfully built it. But as we thought, this case is not about the restic version, but about a butchered password. I do not know what happened in those days. Most likely, I used the RESTIC_PASSWORD variable, and I checked most possible cases for mangling variable values (like ? and ! symbols), but without success. Maybe when the backup was completed, I validated it using the same Shell session, and it explains why validation passed.
So, I guess the only thing left for me is to wait for a breakthrough in quantum computing. When will all the asymmetric cryptography become obsolete?