How to recover the zpool encryption key after OS disk failure

If you can’t get the old config file to boot, you should in theory at least be able to decompress the config .tar and see if it contains the pwenc_secret file.

If it does you can extract any existing key from the other file (the .db) using something that reads sqlite3, as shown in this blog:

You may opt to do this on a client computer, in which case you need to adapt the method to read and unencrypt the keys.

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