Every 3 to 5 weeks I have the following error: Credentials could not be decrypted. The likely reason is that a different “encryptionKey” was used to encrypt the data

[IvanFinochietti]

As the tittle says, every 3 to 5 weeks I have the following error pop-up in my google nodes (sheets, drive, etc.): “Credentials could not be decrypted. The likely reason is that a different “encryptionKey” was used to encrypt the data”.
While looking at this forum, I learned that i have to delete my credentials and create new ones for this my flows to work again, but I already did that 3 times and i’m starting to get tired, is there any definitive solution for this?

What is the error message (if any)?

Credentials could not be decrypted. The likely reason is that a different “encryptionKey” was used to encrypt the data

Example workflow

Information on your n8n setup

• n8n version: 1.95.2
• Database: SQLite
• n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting: Own/Main
• Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app): Locally
• Operating system: Windows 10

[krisn0x]

Hey, take a look at this:

@jan

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.

You could try exporting the credentials, to later import them if this happens again, via the CLI:

n8n export:credentials --all --decrypted --output=backups/decrypted.json

So something is changing every now and then on your end that causes this most probably. Are you running this via pnpm, or via the docker image locally? If using docker, it might not be persisting the data at some point.