EFS Data Recovery Agent - How do I do this?

[rgzimmer]

I have a user who's laptop drive went bad. We can access the file system by plugging into another PC, but the My Doc's folder is encrypted. How do I recover them? It is a domain account and I am a domain admin, but I can't figure out how to import the private key to do the decryption.

Article "242296 How to Restore an EFS Private Key for Encrypted Data Recovery" is no longer available on the MS site.

Has anyone ever done this or can you point me in another direction?

Thanks

 

[bcastner]

I think you are not going to be happy.

But:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;223316&FR=1

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308991&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290260

 

[rgzimmer]

I am becoming more and more displeased with MS's EFS system. They state there is a way to do this recovery, but I can't figure out how to. This user encrypted his files on his own without our knowledge, but that should not be an issue in an AD environment.

This, combined with the way they broke the system in XP SP2 makes me want to avoid this poorly implemented system altogether. It's secure to the point of being unusable.

FYI, there will be a patch out to correct the issue they introduced with SP2 due to what we have found.

Word of warning, decrypt before upgrading to sp2. Your backed up certs won't work on files encrypted after the upgrade.