Espionage 3 lost a folder?!!!

Started by ssh, June 02, 2012, 03:36:47 PM

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ssh

I sure hope that you can help me with this! I have a folder that had been encrypted with Esp 2. I moved all files out of it (it was too large to unencrypt) and then created a new Esp 3 folder. I put the files into it, and locked it, then unlocked it. All went well. I removed Esp 2. However, upon reboot I can no longer unlock the folder. What is going on? How do I recover this folder? I see the sparsebundle, but no passwords are working. There is a non-trivial amount of money represented by the files on that folder!

zsolt

#1
Hello ssh,

You use the master password to unlock the Espionage not the folder.
Do you manage to unlock Espionage and do you see then the added folder in the folder list?
What happens when you click on the unlock button?

Thanks
Zsolt
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ssh

#2
Yes, I had done that first: the folder does not show up in the list in Esp 3. It is on an external drive, if that matters. I have attempted it both with Esp 3 running before I mount the drive and mounting the drive first and then launching Esp 3. It never shows up. As I said, I can see the image, but it never shows up in Esp 3. What are my options?

Thank you.

zsolt

#3
Hello ssh,

One thing we can try is the following:
Inside your Library/Application Support/Espionage/Backups there are backups of database3. This is the database which contains information about the passwords and disk images. There is also one file named database3 in the Espionage folder directly. Please quit espionage 3, rename the database3 file into database3-newest or something like that, and then take one older copy from the backup folder and move it into Espionage i.e. parent folder, and rename it to database3.
Then try to start Espioanage again and see if the folder appears. Do this one file at the time going from newest toward older.
If you do not feel like doing it, then let me know and we can make a remote session and I do it for you.

Rgds
Zsolt
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ssh

#4
None of them worked. Most do not say database3. Most are just "database", which I assume are Esp 2 files. I definitely re-encrypted this with Esp3, however, and used the same name for the folder.

What's next?

zsolt

#5
Hello ssh

When you say, none of the worked, what do you mean? What happens when you replace the database3 with an older one and start Espionage, what do you get?

The trouble here is that the disk image passwords in V3 of Espionage are generated for you by the application, you do not define the password for folders as you didi in V2. Now this is surely a good thing because you do not have to worry about remembering multiple passwords, and the one generated for you is much stronger then you would ever generate, but there is one drawback and this is if you lose the folder in the Espionage then you lost the password too, and even with direct access to the disk image, there is nothing you can do without the password.

So the only hope is to get it back from one of the older databases.

Please let me know what is the error you are getting. Do you run backups? Do you have the old V2 disk image in the backups?
Please run the following command, this will reveal all sparse bundles on your internal disk,
open terminal, paste this command and hit enter, it will ask you for your login password, that is normal, we have to allow find command to enter into all folders.

sudo find / -name *.sparsebundle -print

Try the suggested and let me know the outcome. Also if you did not boot yet, then this is also something you can try, plus, check if something relevant ended up in the trash, like disk image or a document password (delete me).txt

Rgds
Zsolt
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ssh

#6
Yes, I run backups, and yes, Esp3 opens but shows a blank list of folders (with the older databases). I suspect that the one that I need got blown away when I removed Esp 2, since I didn't use the Esp 2 uninstall tool (I didn't know I had to until I went looking for a solution to this problem!). So, since Esp 2 used the same directories and similar file names, App Cleaner probably blew away the database file that I need and so it's all gone. I have a huge data image encrypted because it's important and I will never be able to recover it. I can probably recreate is for about $1k...  :o

zsolt

#7
Hello ssh, it surely does not look good.
These uninstaller applications are something I never really trusted. Those were days when you would uninstall an application by moving it into trash....
One more question, did you maybe change the master password? If you did, can you activate the latest database again, start espionage and change the master password back to original?

Please give it a try and let me know.

Thanks
Zsolt
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ssh

#8
I'm afraid not... I used the same master password as I used on Esp 2.

Lesson learned. Again.   :cry:

zsolt

#9
Yes, it seems that we hit the end of the road with that folder.
What happened, I assume, is that once you removed Espionage 2 with Appuninstaller, it deleted the Espionage 3 data too, not the sparse bundle, because it is on external disk but all the settings and the database. This is why the folder does not appear in the list any more.
If you can dig out with some disk recover utility a file named database3, this is where the data is stored, but considering there are already few days went by, the chances are small.

Rgds
Zsolt
Follow @espionageapp on twitter for news! | For general Mac support, please visit Mac Me Support

ssh

#10
Data 100% lost. This is very disappointing. I hope that you have learned about how to upgrade such a very different program, making sure that the removal of the old program doesn't clobber the new program's configuration files. This is deeply disturbing.  :|   And expensive.   :cry: