I did a reinstall of windows after I was having some issue with updates not working and the winsxs folder was getting huge and eating up about 14gb of my 80gb ssd. I thought I decrypted all the files prior to the uninstall but I guess I missed some. I know the password. Is there any way I can get the old files decrypted?
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What did you encrypt it with? BitLocker? Did you export your personal certificate before changing the password? – Canadian Luke May 29 '13 at 03:59
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See also: http://superuser.com/questions/462971/ive-lost-access-to-my-encrypted-files/463036#463036 – Canadian Luke May 29 '13 at 04:03
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I guess it is bitlocker or efs. I clicked on the encrypt check in the properties menu. I have a backup of my user profile from before the reinstall so would I be able to get the cert from there? – John S May 29 '13 at 04:10
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Is the certificate encrypted itself? If so, then no – Canadian Luke May 29 '13 at 04:11
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nope it was just a documents folder with sensitive stuff like taxes and such not the whole drive. that folder was on a different drive actually. – John S May 29 '13 at 04:14
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If you can access the certificate in an *unencrypted* manner, you can reimport it and read your files – Canadian Luke May 29 '13 at 04:16
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thanks, I am restoring the backup from a cloud service, and its several gigs, so its gonna take a while. do you know where I can find the cert file? – John S May 29 '13 at 04:23
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let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/8983/discussion-between-luke-and-john-s) – Canadian Luke May 29 '13 at 04:30
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Did you solve it? If yes (and you remember how), put it on an answer so other can know how you did it. – PhoneixS May 26 '15 at 15:13