This guide will walk you through the steps to back up and restore an Encrypting File System (EFS) certificate on Windows.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Tarik Rukab | 2022-08-21 19:33:53 |  14,664 Views |
Windows 10 EFS (Encrypted File System) and Recovery Agent
This is the situation: instead of using encryption with BitLocker, you decided to use the encryption feature of Windows. For a while, you could access and modify encrypted data without any problems. One day, you decided to reinstall Windows. Then you tried to open a document that you had previously encrypted, but now you are presented with the "Access Denied" dialog box. And now? There is nothing you can do here except simply delete the documents, because without the decryption key, you have no way to access the encrypted data.
As you can see, when you encrypt data on your Windows computer, you need a way to recover in case something goes wrong. To make sure you don't lose access to your encrypted data, you need to back up the encryption certificate and key, and of course, you also need to know how to recover the certificate and key. That's what you'll learn today.
1. Use Ctrl+R to launch the Run command, type mmc and click OK. This will open the Microsoft Management Console.
