How to decrypt files on portable hdd?

"That," [i]as the old saying goes..[/i] "is the whole point!"

I mean - if someone stole your portable HDD, you wouldn't be happy if it was THAT easy, would you? ;)

Edit for afterthought.

Just to use the Computer that wrote the Data to this drive to unencrypt it.

You can send the HDD away to a Forensic Recovery House to get the Encryption Cracked but it's Expensive, Time Consuming and generally involves involving the Authorities who police Computer Crime in your Area/Country.

So while it is possible to crack the encryption it's not easy and the makers of the different encryption programs quite clearly spell this out to the users of their products.

Generally with the Saying that if the Encryption Key is lost or otherwise deleted it is [b]Impossible to Recover the Data.[/b] which to most people it is. ;)

Col

to a USB drive of any sort, they are not encrypted.

Dare I say it, you have a stolen laptop with pointsec installed and have removed the drive, installed it into a USB caddy and think you can get at the data. No way bro.

Even if you connect it to another pc with pointsec you will not be able to read it.

Security is that way, pointsec is nasty about being secure, to the point of giving us tech folks the inability to recover data.

Why not go back to the original pc and get the files there?

As far as I know, you can't. It's one of the reasons I chose Sophos SafeGuard over PointSec. With SGN, you can transfer or copy rights to a certificate key to another user. If you're copying files to a USB device, you also have the option to include a decryption program on the device that responds to either a certificate key or a password.