Rick, if you have resolved this would you please respond with what you found
out?

If you haven't found a resolution, can you provide a few more clues:
1. What OS were the laptops running and what OS is on your recovery station?
2. Is the File Recovery certificate that applied to the encrypted files
installed on your recovery station?
3. Is the recovery station OS on NTFS or FAT32?

If EFS was used to encrypt the files, the files should still be physically
located where they were encrypted--in the My Documents folder. I'm guessing
that what you have heard about encrypted files residing in a virtual location
may be in reference to offline encrypted files. Were the files on these
laptops enabled for offline encryption?

Thanks.
Pat
--
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.


"Rick" wrote:

> I see a lot of information about this subject, but nothing that addresses my
> problem. I'm a computer tech with a rather large company of over 10,000
> worldwide. Due to sensitive data issues, we encrypt the My Documents folder
> and the Outlook folder on every computer in the company. I deal mainly with
> laptops. When a laptop hard drive is dying, I need to get the data from it.
> It is not bootable when I get it, so I connect it to a USB device I connect
> toa box I built for data recovery. The laptop hard drive is now a slave
> drive to the desktop computer. In some cases, not many, but enough to
> warrant this question, I can see the file structure except for the encrypted
> folders.
>
> In order to run the EFS Recovery process in house, I need to be able to see
> the data so I can unencrypt it after running the Backup and Restore on the
> slave drive. But I can't even run the NTBackup on those folders because they
> appear invisible. Even a hard drive search gives me nothing. Show all
> hidden files is checked so I can see everything.
>
> Some think MS encrypted data really isn't where you see it, but is mirrored
> somewhere else for its own protection. I'm sure it is still on the hard
> drive. I just can't see or find it.
>
> I need to know how to locate that encrypted data so as to be able to run the
> NTBackup and Restore features of EFS Recovery to unencrypt it. I would think
> it would be a rather simple solution and I may be overlooking something here,
> but I'm just not seeing it.
>
> Please, if anyone knows where this data is hiding and how to expose it so I
> can recover it, I would appreciate it. Tried calling MS on this and kept
> getting pushed up the ladder until they wanted to send this to the
> Professional level and charge me $245.00. Because this is business related,
> I couldn't authorize that expense. So, I'm trying this forum in hopes
> someone can help me out.
>
> Thank you for any information that may help. If you want to contact me
> directly, please send email to rlyle@amazon.com
>
> Thanx, Rick