Hi All,
I am truly hope that you will be able to help me with this as i am devastated after realizing that i lost my data from the last 10 years.
I backed up my documents from win 7 to an external hard drive and formatted my laptop twice after having on it win 7. I then installed a fresh windows 8 and when i tried to copy back my files from the external hard drive to the new windows 8 or even to any other computer, I couldn't access the files nor open them as they are encrypted. I then realized that i should have saved the certificate to restore access to EFS encrypted files. I tried all sort of tools such as Advanced EFS data recovery and other offline professional data recovery companies for the last month and yet with no success to recover the files.
Can anyone, please help me with any input to sort out this issue if possible. I don't mind to pay for such a service but so far online and offline data recovery companies couldn't help me with a solution and said that i lost my data forever since i didn't save the EFS certificate and a backup of the certificate that was in use and its private ke .
Please note that the files/data are still on the external HD with the original files sizes and folders. I still believe that there is a way to bypass the EFS encryption even that i wont be able to get hold of the old win 7 EFS certificate for these files.
Thank you in advance for any input,
Ben