Hi,

My hard drive recently crashed. I have made periodic backups and saved these to an external hard drive. However, I also encrypted them (by right clicking on the file, advanced, encrypt option). Unfortunately, I did not export the keys.

How do I restore this backup now that the original encryption key is on the crashed drive? I cannot startup in windows xp from this drive anymore. But I am able to access the crashed hard drive using special software and was wondering if there is a clever work-around. Can I get the key file from the crashed drive and import that into xp?

To summarize:

- Backup of OS + SysState Data -> External Drive
- Encrypt Backup on External Drive Only
- Did not export keys
- Hard drive crashed but has files accessible using special software
- Cannot restore/decrypt Backups

My flaw here was not to export the keys.

Thanks for any help.