ryokimball

At some point, you gotta just accept that things are gone and start hunting for the next radroach to eat. I guess the corpo speak for this is acceptable loses and/or risk management.

In the most extreme cases, the final backup of my most important files are on my phone. With all the compromises we’re forced to make there, I still refuse to buy one without an SD card slot, so I have swappable 1TB with me at all times. Importantly, it’s also not the Source of Truth, so if it’s lost I’m still recoverable, but if it’s the last piece of electronics above sea level at least I still have that.

But for power management, I just have some UPSes that sustain a graceful shutdown and that’s about it. If I’m on the lam, I would rather the 20TB of manga and anarchist zines be destroyed (read: crypto keys lost) than try to figure out how to carry it with me. Maybe the offsite backup strategy will finally get tested once I’ve established an alternate identity.

I love how, in the time it took me to tell that story, other people gave the same answer in a much more straightforward manner.

Okay, so… Mechanical drive failure sucks. You may not be completely out of luck, though.

First thing to try would be throwing it in a bag of rice and freezing it. The rice is just to help prevent condensation. In theory, the contraction from the freezing temperatures can help with some physical clearances or something like that.

Now… Definitely try that before this next step. In fact, try literally anything and everything you can before this next step. It is a stupid thing to do and I should probably be downvoted for even suggesting it.

But… I had an early iPod with a mechanical hard drive which I thought was dead. I was saving up money to send it off to be serviced because the warranty had expired. It was sitting on the top of my dresser. A friend came over and knocked it off, he picked it up and showed it to me, booting up and running just fine. Some months later it started clicking again. I weighed my options, and eventually I dropped it on the floor on purpose, picked it up and held the power button, and it came on without issue. Some time after that, My laptop hard drive started behaving similarly. Guess what? Removed the drive, banged it against my knee or something, stuck it back in the computer, runs without issue.

I am still not explicitly suggesting this. Those platters inside are made of glass and there is a very, very small gap between the surface where the data is stored and the needles which are doing the reading / writing. You cannot do this carefully enough to ensure that you won’t shatter a platter or ram a needle into the metal substrate. But if you have nothing to lose… maybe some concussive engineering can help.

I am sick and slightly out of my mind anyway so I’m not going to be very helpful. One thing that stands out though, if you can SSH the machine and you can curl local host to Port 8,000 or whatever. This should help you troubleshooting the container while it lives on the VPS I think

I think when people want to remotely decrypt fde the usual advice is installing dropbear SSH to remotely enter the password. Sorry for not providing links but it should be easy to find.