Odd question... Please help.

Khera · Post by **Khera** » Wed Dec 17, 2008 10:34 pm

So... I could really use some help, and I know most of the people know a lot about computers (same as me, but this one has been stumped)

Ok, so I was stupid and encrypted some files on my storage drive (Where my WoW is installed). Well, the other day, I had to reinstall XP (Pro) without being able to back up any registry data, including my keys (Certs).. Now I can not access my encrypted files, of course.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

Yes I formatted my main drive and no I did not back them up.

I have a program (Advanced EFS Data Recovery 4.0), but its not able to decrypt the files yet.. Still working on that..

Any ideas? Please!!!!!

Post by **Rollie** » Wed Dec 17, 2008 11:58 pm

Oof, sounds icky. Can't offer any help other than offering emotional support!

Khera · Post by **Khera** » Thu Dec 18, 2008 12:02 am

Heh its worse than just having the WoW folder encrypted... There are pictures of my kids on there.. From birth to now...

/CRY!

Post by **Rollie** » Thu Dec 18, 2008 10:19 am

Yeah, I had a harddrive fail a few years back that had a lot of old pictures on it that were lost. It is what prompted me to buy an external HD only for backup purposes.

exportforce · Post by **exportforce** » Thu Dec 18, 2008 5:40 pm

For that you mostly have a "Emergency CD/DVD" which you have (some programs only optional) to be able to read these. If you ain't got that, you're totally outta luck.
Try asking the devs if they have a solution.

Alanthus · Post by **Alanthus** » Thu Dec 18, 2008 10:05 pm

Only way is if you have an emergency disk or some kind of encryption phrase used. If you did use some of the simpler ones it *MAY* be possible to brute force it in just a few years based on what people have supposedly managed to do using high end GFX cards but that is still a ways off... May be worth keeping the encrypted files around though.

DM. · Post by **DM.** » Fri Dec 19, 2008 12:10 am

Having an encrypted drive is great... but getting the data out when you really really need it... is not.

I'm sure there are companys out there that will offer data recovery services. Prob some in the yellow pages or maybe even best buy might do it? Worth a shot... Memories are worth way more than the $100 or whatever ridiculous charge it might be now.

uigrad · Post by **uigrad** » Fri Dec 19, 2008 10:44 am

Well, a recovery company may be able to help you recover the keys, but if the keys are truly gone, then there's nothing you can do about it. That's the whole idea of encryption. If it takes 'n' clock cycles to generate the key, then it takes approximately 'n^2' clock cycles to brute force break it. A key that requires 30 seconds to generate (30 seconds * 1.5GFLOPS = 45 GFLOPs) would take 2,025,000,000,000 GFLOPs to brute force hack -- 1424 years on the same machine, or 1 year on 1424 machines.

I would think that when you created the key, you would have used a passphrase (usually a sentence), so that you could recover the keys if necessary.

Also, do you know the file location of the keys? Are you sure that they aren't still there? If you reinstalled windows without doing a hard drive format, then it would have probably left those files in the same location.