i am running self hosted n8n on unraid and suddenly today,
some of my existing workflow is facing this error. It happens on nextcloud node, google sheet node and seatable node. I tried renewing my seatable api , and it is showing the same error
and i am running the following version.
The error message actually describes exactly what the problem is. The “encryptionKey” must have changed. To be more exact, did you either not persist the ~/.n8n folder or the file ~/.n8n/config (in which the key is stored) got deleted.
In case you did set the encryptionKey via the environment variable N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY, then the value of that variable must have changed.
There is sadly no way of getting the data back without the original key (after all, is exactly that the reason for having it). What you have to do, is to make sure that in the future the encryptionKey does get persistent and does not change again. Then delete all existing credentials and recreate them again.
Sorry, there is sadly nothing else that can be done.
Not sure how you run n8n but I advice you follow our Server Setup Guide to make sure that n8n is setup correctly.
Hello @jan thank you for guiding on how to solve the problem. I will take a look at what happens to my setup… 
Great to hear that it was helpful!
Good luck with finding what went wrong in your setup.
Hey there,
Can someone guide be how the configuration needs to be adjusted, so the credentials are preserved, even after server restarts?
That depends on how you run n8n. Can you please provide some information about that. Thanks!
Hi, I have the same problem with credentials / encryption. I am running the self-hosted-starter-kit - I would like to set persistence but do not know how - I also cannot run ‘n8n’ from the CLI so I can not do the command suggested to backup. And I do not have a ~/.n8n folder/file.
Linux Mint Wilma Stable. cloned the GIT self-host today (Jan 19th)
Wenn du das Self-Hosted Starter Kit (oder ein beliebiges Docker Compose Setup) verwendest, gibt es kein ~/.n8n auf dem Host — deshalb kannst du es nicht finden. Es befindet sich im Container auf einem named volume, und die CLI ist auch nicht auf deinem Host. Beide sind über compose erreichbar:
docker compose exec n8n cat /home/node/.n8n/config
Diese Datei enthält den encryptionKey, den n8n beim ersten Start generiert hat. Speichere ihn jetzt irgendwo sicher, bevor du ihn brauchst.
Um nicht mehr von dieser Datei abhängig zu sein, setze den Schlüssel explizit in deiner .env:
N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY=
Wichtig: Setze ihn auf den Wert, der bereits in dieser Konfigurationsdatei steht, nicht auf eine neue Zufallszeichenkette. Ein neuer Schlüssel kann Anmeldedaten, die mit dem alten verschlüsselt wurden, nicht entschlüsseln — das ist genau der Fehler in diesem Thread.
Und für den Export-Befehl läuft er auch über compose:
docker compose exec n8n n8n export:credentials --all --decrypted --output=/home/node/.n8n/creds.json
(Der Dienstname kann je nach deiner Compose-Datei von „n8n
