EFS and Vista.... and backup ( or lack thereof )

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EFS and Vista…One word of warning. Backup with Vista does *not* backup your encrypted files.

Let’s see this demonstrated here…

Here are 2 files one encrypted and one is not.

I just finished a backup as you can see

Now we delete them…

Restore files…

QAdd files from …

Choose my desktop..

We don’t see the encrypted file as an option to restore:

There are a dozen reasons why I don’t like this.. but we wont get into them now. Let’s just all be aware of this .. it renders this article HOW TO: Use Ntbackup to Recover an Encrypted File or Folder in Windows 2000irrelevant for Vista

So how should you back them up? Robocopy supports a switch called /efsraw and there are 3rd party backup solutions which support this backup functionality.  

Spatdsg