Data Recovery

Clarifications

Calling Microsoft won't help you either and their response would be to get a good hacker to crack your file encryption. Why do people continue using EFS if they don't understand how it works and then cry foul when they lose their only method to decrypt the files after they stupidly format their hard drives?

Try this, we use it here at work, and it has worked for us 95% of the time.
http://tinyurl.com/yojoyb

Good luck!!
Post a response please if this was helpful or not.

Kevin

Remove the HDD and take it to a company like On Track. Tell them what you have done and they can Forensically recover your Encryption Key. Though this does involve the destruction of the HDD in question and you forking over several Hundred Thousand Dollars they can recover the Encryption Key quite easily though to be fair it's very time consuming and you'll get back every layer of data that was ever written to that particular HDD.

If you know a [b]Reputable Hacker[/b] yes I know that is an Oxymoron but if you do have a hacker who you are friends with they should with time be able to crack the 128 Bit Encryption though then you run the risk of your data becoming Public Domain.

If you have friends in the right places they can recover your data within seconds as there is a Back-door into the EFS System that M$ has to provide to Government Security Agencies so that they are able to quickly and easily break the encryption and read the contents just to make sure that there is nothing of concern in any encrypted data within e-mails sent. So if you know someone within your countries Security Service they will be able to crack the encryption for you but they will have to do it quietly behind the backs of others so you are placing their jobs at risk in most cases.

Similarly if you know someone within the right Government Agency they can recovery every layer of DATA on the HDD and some times they require a Test HDD to perform this recovery method upon just to test the hardware involved in doing this work so you could volunteer you HDD for this to be run on but it could take years before the contents are returned to you if ever.

On track also offers a service to break Encryption on saved data though to be perfectly honest I've never actually had to utilise this service so I'm not sure what is involved or how much money it actually costs.

In this case you can not even be blamed for not [b]RTFM[/b] as there is no Manual to read. But like everything with M$ you do things at your own risk with no chance of any help from M$ when you mess up.

Actually M$ could open its own Recovery Department and make a bundle out of recovering backed up encrypted files where the encryption key wasn't saved. They already know the way to break the encryption as they have had to provide this to the Governments in the countries that they sell their software. But they will never tell a Gold Certified Partner how to do this so anyone else has absolutely no chance of being told and this process is as closely guarded as the Source Code of Windows so M$ is understandably unwilling to hand out this information to anyone who they are not required by Law to.

But because this is such a common problem at the next Partners Meeting of M$ I'll put it to them that they start their own Data Recovery Service for people who have been caught out by their software and suggest that they can make much more money then selling a new OS and a complete software load with very little effort on their part. That should get the Bean Counters to Jump at the Idea though they will still charge members of the General Public through the nose for this service. But it may be cheaper than the current Commercial Services available.

Col