That’s a tough spot to be in. Make a raw block by block backup of the entire drive before you start mucking with it. You can easily make things worse without knowing it. If you somehow figure out a way 6 months from now to get things back but today you did something that screws that, that’ll be even tougher to swallow.
Discussion
Yeah, imaging the backup drive now. It's a lot of data. There is one tool existing that can find the files but it seems to only log their locations, so I will seek to fork that and make it recover the possible files and then I just need to install core on a machine and try them until I find the most current one, and dump all of the secret keys of all, anyhow
I know what's required I just literally did not know non hd keychains were a thing and didn't make sure I was using one.
HD is easy to secure against loss. Nondeterministic is a huge pain.
And yeah, I can go to that length. I have drives that can take both, I fortunately got 2 4tb disks... One is a windows install but after backing up the data on it to my spare smaller disks and ensuring I have all my keys for all else done I can duplicate the primary zfs containing disk too
I'm sure I am going to figure this out.
It reminds me I was going to run vanilla, which is a layered snapshot driven Linux. It would have been easy to run it on the machine that had Bitcoin core, and this problem would have been much easier to recover from... It was literally because I stupidly used zfs on it
Never ever zfs. It is the Wayland of storage, fucking shit.