It was totally this, thanks!

I actually tried entering my password with caps lock on just in case, still didn’t work sadly

I encrypted it using Gnome Disks, haven’t had any problems with it for years until now

I tried mounting it normally with Dolphin on KDE Plasma, after it was giving me an error I tried unlocking it in terminal via sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda1 backups

Here’s the output of the command you sent: /dev/sda1: UUID="109ffa3d-6181-43cf-a813-fdd285386866" TYPE="crypto_LUKS" PARTUUID="ac0402f1-01"

but I suspect that you will need to wipe the drive and set it up again while ensuring that the volume key is stored on the external drive itself.

Whenever I format a drive I just use Gnome Disks since it’s the easiest and it lets me encrypt it using LUKs as a option, I’ve never had an issue like this for years until now since whenever I’ve used Gnome Disks in the past it always lets me decrypt the drive on any other Linux machine

Hmm, what method did you use to back it up?

I used an app called “Pika Backups” , it shouldn’t effect LUKs at all tho and the backups themselves weren’t corrupted because it also lets me verify the integrity of the backup files which I did before distro hopping and I got no errors

it’s nice to have fun once in awhile