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