Backup/restore problem - Restore is failing: invalid character 'K' looking for beginning of value

Vault
1

I am trying to backup my transit key from one vault into another.

What I did.

On the source vault server:

vault write transit/keys/my_key/config allow_plaintext_backup=true exportable=true

vault read transit/backup/my_key

Saved that output to a file: my_key

On the destination vault server, I already had a key with that name, so I did delete it first:

vault write transit/keys/my_key/config deletion_allowed=true

vault delete transit/keys/my_key

After that, with the file my_key already there in /tmp/my_key, I tried:

vault write transit/restore/my_key backup=@/tmp/my_key

And it fails… I get:

Error writing data to transit/restore/my_key: Error making API request.

URL: PUT http://127.0.0.1:8200/v1/transit/restore/my_key
Code: 500. Errors:

* 1 error occurred:
        * illegal base64 data at input byte 3

So I thought, maybe I need to base64 it?

and I did:

cat my_key | base64 > test.b64

vault write transit/restore/my_key backup=@/vault/data/tmp/test.b64

And got the error:

Error writing data to transit/restore/my_key: Error making API request.

URL: PUT http://127.0.0.1:8200/v1/transit/restore/my_key
Code: 500. Errors:

* 1 error occurred:
        * invalid character 'K' looking for beginning of value

Any clue on what might be wrong?

Thank you.