Fellow selfhoster, do you encrypt your drives where you put data to avoid privacy problems in case of theft? If yes, how? How much does that impact performances? I selfhost (amongst other services) NextCloud where I keep my pictures, medical staff, …in short, private stuff and I know that it’s pretty difficult that a thief would steal my server, buuut, you never know! 🤷🏻♂️
The way you recover data from a totally dead drive is use a program that scans every byte and looks for structures in the data that look like files e.g. a jpeg will have a header followed by some blocks of content. In an encrypted drive everything looks like random data.
Even if you have the key, you can’t begin searching through the data until it’s decrypted, and the kind of error that makes it so your drive won’t mount normally is likely to get in the way of decrypting normally as well.