It looks like your persistent data might still be intact in your Docker volume, but the new container might not be reading the workflows because of a change in the encryption key. n8n stores workflows (along with credentials and other user data) in the /home/node/.n8n folder. When no directory is found, n8n creates one and also generates a new encryption key if you don’t explicitly set one using the N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY environment variable. That means if your previous container used a different encryption key than your new one, the workflows stored in the volume won’t appear.

Here are a couple of suggestions:

1. Verify the volume contents:
   You can inspect the contents of the Docker volume to check if the workflows data is still there. For example, run:

   BASHCopied
   docker run -it --rm -v n8n_data:/data alpine ls /data

   This should show you files and directories that were previously persisted.

2. Set a custom encryption key:
   To ensure consistency between container restarts or re-deployments, explicitly set the N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY environment variable in your Docker run command. For example:

   BASHCopied
   docker run -it --rm \
     --name n8n \
     -p 5678:5678 \
     -e N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY="my_custom_key" \
     -v n8n_data:/home/node/.n8n \
     docker.n8n.io/n8nio/n8n

   Use the same encryption key that was used previously. If you didn’t set one earlier, you might have to check your old configuration if possible.

Using these steps should help you verify and load your workflows from the persistent volume.