0

I had a problem on my encrypted files. I tried to uncheck (Encrypt contents to secure data) in the file properties. "An error occurred applying attributes to this file "Access denied." My Deep Freeze program is on during the process of encryption. After my computer restarted, I cannot open the said file. Please help.

jAce
  • 1,382
  • 6
  • 17
  • 32
Alas
  • 1

1 Answers1

6

I'm guessing that this was the first time you tried to use EFS file encryption on this system, so Windows generated you a fresh keypair; however, when you rebooted, Deep Freeze removed all changes including the new EFS keypair.

By design, if you don't have the encryption key, then you cannot decrypt the data.

The encryption keys are stored in a hidden directory:

C:\Users\<name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\<sid>\

You could try a file recovery tool to see if the keys could be undeleted, although I don't know how to use them directly – you will probably need an EFS recovery tool in addition to that.

My advice: Restore from backups.

grawity
  • 501,077