I managed to delete the secret key material for my GPG key. Well, piss. Let me tell you about revocation certificates. This doesn't contain your secret keys, but can be used to revoke the key. I had one, and thus it was easy to revoke the key and generate a new one. Generate one. Trust me. PS: anyone going off about backups will be stabbed in the eyes. Because I don't have cause to use my key much (I sign my commits with a SSH key) the data loss happened over a year ago. All my backups had aged out.