Windows XP Encryption

I did learn something new yesterday. I had to copy certain pictures from my camera to my portable hard drive. Obviously I was away from my computer, so I went over to my relative's place and used her laptop to copy the pictures. I was so happy that I had dumped all the pictures to the hard drive and that I could clear my memory card for taking further pictures. I happily discinnected my hard drive and camera and headed out thanking her for the help.

The next day I connected my hard drive to copy the pictures and start uploading them. As soon as I connected the hard drive, that particular folder was green in color. I wondered why it was green in color and not the usual black. I have not changed any settings to have different font colors. My curiosity grew when I could not view the folder contents. I was able to see that the folder had about 70 pictures but I could not preview them or view any thumbnails. All I saw was green colored font for all the 70 pictures. I did not know what to do as somewhere in mind I was getting scared thinking about having lost all the 70 pictures and that there was no way of recovering them.

I thought for a couple of minutes and then I said to myself - If the files were not copied properly then why would they have green color and why would the folder show all the picture names without any thumbnail. Then I right click one of the pictures and see its properties - I tried to uncheck the Read-Only attribute and found that I was not able to do so. Ha Ha - that intrigued me - I checked the advanced properties of the file. The file was ENCRYPTED!

I thanked God for there was some ray of hope of recovering the encrypted files and that I have not completely lost all the files. Googled on Windows XP Encryption and read some literatures about it. The most interesting one amongst them was the Microsoft's MSDN article about the WinXP excryption: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308993

It said the following:

Only the following people can decrypt an encrypted file.
• The user who encrypted the file
• Any user who was designated as a recovery agent before the file was encrypted
• Any user who has the public key or private key for the recovery agent or the user that originally encrypted the file
• Any user who has been granted access to the file

I immediately called my relative and asked her to please keep the laptop that I used for copying the pictures and explained the entire mess I was in. I went over tonight and decrypted the pictures. I came back home and checked the pictures - Indeed the encryption was not there. Whew ! What a relief. Sometimes the measures you take in preventing fraudulent activites on your computer can be very irritating and time consuming process to recover certain documents for others to use. All in all I learnt something new yesterday.