harddrive crashed
I am new to GPG. I had the latest version of the GPG bundle and Mac 10.9 but last week my computer crashed. I got my hard rive replaced and reinstalled GPG. How do I add my old secret key to this keychain? I have files that are encrypted on my external hard rive that say - Decrypt failed! (No secret key) Code = 17. Nothing is important if lost or if it stays encrypted it is only 2 documents but I would still like to use the same public key that I shared with people. I found my email on the Public Key Server but how do I open those documents or use that email with the public key I originally generated?
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Support Staff 1 Posted by Steve on 01 Dec, 2013 06:29 PM
Hi Mike,
sorry to hear about your troubles. Crashing harddrives are a pain. Happens to me frequently. Hope you had a usable backup?
As for your secret key: Do you have a backup of your keyring? Or did you backup the secret key and store it in a safe location? Did you maybe create a revocation certificate?
Those things are important and we suggest them briefly at the end of our Getting Started Tutorial.
We need to make those much more prominent to prevent situations like the one you are in.
If the answer to all above questions is "no", there's nothing much except to create a new key and start using that. That would mean game over for the two encrypted documents. But maybe one of the solutions does work for you?
Best, steve
Support Staff 2 Posted by Steve on 07 Jan, 2014 04:24 PM
No further user feedback. Closing.
Mike, should your problem persist, feel free to re-open this discussion any time.
All the best, steve
Steve closed this discussion on 07 Jan, 2014 04:24 PM.
Steve closed this discussion on 20 Jun, 2014 11:22 AM.