I lost my encryption key – what can I do?

The answer is unfortunately very likely to be “nothing”. It’s real encryption; and people who don’t have the key can’t get the data; it’s meant to be mathematically impossible with current knowledge. National security agencies can hire encryption experts to build large super-computers to try to break the encryption by brute force, at a huge price – but that’s beyond the reach of other mortals.

You must keep your encryption key stored safely so that you won’t have this problem… if it’s already too late for you, then you might try to remember really hard to see if you’ve perhaps got an old backup or copy of the database somewhere. If you have, then search in it for the text “updraft_encryptionphrase”. If your database is online, then it’s the ‘Options’ table that you’re wanting to search in.