2 Computer Crises in 1 Week

2025-01-02 04:20:13Z (last updated 2025-01-10 22:06:14Z)

Computer crises what?

"Crises" is the plural of "Crisis" (i.e. there's multiple of them).

"Computer crises" as in "oh crap I screwed something up on the computer and now this is a massive problem". A phone counts as a computer because they basically are computers at this point, even if locked down to hell by basically every major phone manufacturer.

I have had only 2 of them recently, and I am going to only talk about the ones recently. Because I felt like it. Not much other particular reasons, except for the second one (chronologically).

What happened?

2 major things, in chronological order:

• Minecraft world corruption
• A few days later, locked out of my own phone

Minecraft world corruption

So I was playing Minecraft on my encrypted external drive. It was touched by someone by accident, and it basically got unplugged and crashed my computer (veracrypt seems to be the cause of some crashes in weird ways related to I/O timeout, it handles unexpected unplug very badly).

=> Encrypted external drive setup

Computer restarts, I log back in, and load the Minecraft world has 3 chunk that's just swapped, fenced entities broke loose, and some sugar cane became dropped item, with the terrain completely screwed up.

Crap.

So I go and try to restore from backups, but found the only recent ones were a couple hours old, and I've made quite some progress/changes already.

So, I restore backups. I load the world, it's fine. Welp, that's the best I have, only a couple of hours before.

I still managed to have ReplayMod recordings, which I haven't checked if they're corrupted, but they very likely show progress, although unlikely to be usable for restoring backups.

From this, I learned to backup more often with the Minecraft world and stuff. Not that I've fully figured it out yet.

Locked out of my own phone

I woke up at around 9 am, after having only slept for maybe 4 hours (my sleep schedule is not fit for society :p). With me bored, I started exploring my phone settings a bit.

Recently, I also got upgraded to Android 14. That seems to have lifted the maximum character limit for custom passwords from 16 characters to 63 characters (I would say "alphanumeric" but mine contains symbols), so I was like "hey I'm gonna try my passphrase and see if it works now" and it does!

I commit to it, changing my password to an amount of digits to my passphrase. Then I do stuff that requires my password.

My password isn't right. Multiple times. I checked I typed everything right. In fact, before I reset the phone (much later), it was incorrect 16 times.

Then I realized "oh crap, I can't unlock my phone anymore if I lock it"

So I proceeded to change the locking settings so that my phone will only lock after 30 minutes, and won't instantly lock by pressing the power button. That didn't require a password.

Next, backups. I already had them, but I decided to look for more.

Backups

SeedVault is my phone backup application (built into /e/OS, not really an ordinary app), and it also seemed to have recently gained a feature (in expert settings): "Device-to-Device backups"

Basically, it'll backup all apps, even those that say "don't back me up". It's marked alpha, and I can agree about the alpha part since during backups, because it has seemed to consistently slow down my phone to an absolute crawl with multi-second touch input delays. Even though backups might happen only while charging, that's still annoying and can sometimes be permanent until rebooted, so it was only turned on temporarily.

=> (Why apps won't allow themselves to be backed up)

After the backup to complete, well, that was about it. I was prepared for the worst of having to reset my phone in case my phone locked. So I did try to keep it unlocked.

Even if my phone was locked with a password (which I don't know how I messed twice the same way), I could still do things like take pictures, which I would occasionally do, even after my phone locked. My phone wasn't rebooted, so Syncthing would still be active and syncing the photos to my other devices.

My phone got locked

I forgot to keep my phone unlocked. And it locked. And it required the password "for additional security".

So, I was screwed.

I checked Syncthing on my other devices to see if everyone's up to date. Yep.

So I just went with it. I shutdown my phone (making me permanently unable to use my locked-with-wrong-password phone), and then held the volume up button on boot to enter I guess the recovery menu.

In the recovery menu, I selected factory reset. Then I confirmed it. Done in a second, everything was gone from my phone (or, at least, the decryption keys for that data was gone). After rebooting my phone from that, it rebooted once, and then ended up on the /e/OS[^stille] setup screen[^noantitheft].

(Yes I'm aware I'm still using /e/OS. It's what I had, and what I still have. Trying to change it mid-crisis was not a good idea to be honest. Second side-note: /e/OS does not have an anti-theft function. It probably won't, mainly due to how it's implemented on other phones, although in theory they could implement that (although maybe only with using their accounts system, which should honestly remain optional instead of being required for things that can't be done another way)

Restoring

I setup the phone. No backup prompts. I dial the "restore backups" number only for it to disappear and nothing to happen. Weird.

=> The number to put in the dialer to restore from SeedVault backups, supposedly

I go to the settings for SeedVault, and it prompts for restoring backups or setting up a new backup. I press restore, follow instructions, enter passwords and stuff, setting up access to my backups (which are just WebDAV), etc.

Then it gave me some choices of what to backup. Obviously I chose the one with the most recent backups. There also seemed to be some other backups laying around for whatever reason, which I manually removed later (they seem to be Unix timestamp folders of first backup for each device).

SeedVault proceeded to first reinstall all apps. Only 1 app failed to install, and it just prompted me to manually do that. So I did that, setting up F-Droid repos and then installing the app, then clearing F-Droid data just in case SeedVault complained about existing data when restoring.

Next was restoring data. It just did that, but a few apps failed. Those apps I had to restore manually, like Signal. That had separate backups

Final step was asking to use a backup to restore files. I didn't have that (and instead used Syncthing in this case[^syncthingbackups]). End of SeedVault restore.

After opening Syncthing (so I could get my files back[^syncthingbackups]), I was prompted with permissions granting. I paused all folders while offline, then went online to test with 1 folder. Stuff automatically was just put back, and folders were automatically created.

Side-note on using Syncthing here:

Syncthing is not a backup tool, it is a file synchronization tool. Deleting a file on one device will delete it on all devices. If you are going to use it as a backup tool, consider your use case carefully and its edge cases.

My use case in case of disaster was "device disappears and starts with no files, and other devices have files, which are backed up to somewhere else using actual and proper backup tools". Outside of that, it is just a normal synchronization tool so I don't have to transfer a bunch of files on-demand and instead have it available pretty much any time.

So after confirming Syncthing won't eat all my data, I just resumed everything and it just started syncing everything back.

In the end, SeedVault (in /e/OS) was able to restore about 60% of my settings, and 90% of my apps (not including files, as I didn't use that). Some of them I had to resetup from scratch again (restoring from their backups if I had any), especially those which... told Android to not back them up. I had to restore some settings manually.

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