Nextcloud Ubuntu 22.04
So I didn't lose any of my data as I had thought. It just happened to be the default encryption method used by Nextcloud's server-side encryption is depreciated in Ubuntu 22.04 and I had to modify my openssl.cnf file to enable the legacy encryption options again.
I think it wouldn't be a bad idea for Nextcloud to warn people which encryption it uses by default before enabling it so that they can choose for themselves.
Silver Lining
it was always a nightmare scenario for me that it wasn't going to be losing the database that killed it, that it would be someone realizing my account was only protected by a password and how easy it would have been to take over the sole administrator account of the instance.
24M | Linux/Windows System & Network Engineer | All posts are my own | IPv6 or bust