At the notary office, the deeds cannot be restored: the “green” backup refuses to open

The Zerhouni & Alaoui notary office, in Meknes (new town, 14 staff), keeps its draft deeds, sale agreements and client documents on the actes share of the file server srv-fichiers (Debian 12, Samba, folder /srv/partages/actes). A contractor, who left in 2025, had set up a restic backup every night at 02:00 to the office NAS (mounted over NFS on /mnt/nas). Every morning, a “Backup OK” report lands in the office mailbox.

On Friday 16/10 at 15:10, a clerk opened a fake invoice: their PC encrypted the whole actes share (files renamed to .locked). The PC was isolated. On Saturday, Hamza, the office's IT contact, reinstalled srv-fichiers from scratch “as a precaution”, taking the opportunity to fit a new SSD. The share is empty.

This Monday morning, three property sale signings are scheduled at 11:00. Hamza starts the restore… and the restic repository refuses to open. You are the systems administrator, logged in as root on the new srv-fichiers. Restore the deeds to their last clean state.