System Recovery Procedure

(LLM used to help organize and translate this post) Why I had backups, but I had never proven that I could get from a dead disk back to a working laptop. Every night restic sends my data and configuration to Backblaze B2, and a healthcheck tells me when something is stale. A backup you have never restored is an assumption. And the data is only part of the problem. After a failure I would have to remember the disk layout, the encryption setup, the package list, which files in /etc matter, and the order of it all, probably on a bad day and without my own notes, which would be on the dead machine. So the goal was concrete: a procedure I could follow with nothing but a USB stick, a paper card and a network connection, and which I had actually run. The constraints are the same as for the rest of my setup: security, privacy, minimalism, sovereignty and longevity. That meant POSIX shell, busybox tools, the stock Alpine installer, and no extra framework. How I split recovery into three…