I recently managed to recover data I thought I had lost years ago.
Around seven years ago, I created two VeraCrypt containers that held some really important personal data. At some point, those files were accidentally deleted. Luckily, I was able to recover the containers later by pulling a disk image.
That solved one problem, but it immediately revealed another one.
I had the containers back, but I had forgotten the passwords.
The Problem
For years, I assumed the data was gone. I still kept the recovered containers, mostly with this half-serious hope that maybe quantum computing would eventually save me.
Recently, I decided to actually take a crack at it.
I started by making a list of all the words the password could realistically contain. At first, the math was ridiculous. With 20 possible words in different orders, the number of combinations came out to:
20! = 2,432,902,008,176,640,000 combinationsMy humble RTX 5060 Ti was not going to cut it.
Simplifying the Search Space
The breakthrough was realizing that I did not need to brute-force the entire problem blindly.
I went back through what I actually remembered. Some parts of the password had a known order. Some words belonged together. Some uncertainty still existed, but not everywhere. I also narrowed capitalization down to only the specific letters that realistically could have been uppercase.
That took the search space from completely impossible to around:
31,457,280 candidatesStill a lot, but actually doable.
The Recovery Attempt
Once the search space was reasonable, I extracted the VeraCrypt header, generated the wordlists, split them into smaller batches, and started testing.
A couple of batches in, the first container got a hit.
I had the password.
I mounted the container and recovered some of my most important old data after years of thinking it was gone forever.
The One That Did Not Make It
The second container was not as lucky.
The header was mostly zeroed out, and the backup header looked corrupted too. Most likely, the recovered file was never a good copy in the first place.
Final result:
- One container recovered.
- One container permanently lost.
What I Learned
If I had adopted the backup and password management practices I use today, this would never have been a problem.
It also reminded me that not every piece of data needs the highest possible level of encryption. For some data, availability matters more than confidentiality.
Sometimes the biggest risk is not someone else accessing your data. It is you losing access to it forever.
Good backups, tested recovery, and sane password management are boring right up until the day they become the only thing that matters.