Encryption uses "keys" to scramble meaningful sequences of letters into
meaningless sequences of letters. Equally important, the same key must be
available to descramble the now meaningless sequence of letters back to a
meaningful sequence of letters. Encryption has been around long before
there were computers. Problem was, the process took a lot longer. Now
imagine you lived in the days before computers. You use a decoder ring to
scramble a top secret document into a meaningless sequence of letters. Then
you burn both the decoder ring and the original document. That's what just
happened on your PC in layman terms.
To prevent this from happening in the future, you can do 2 things. First,
open up Help and Support in XP (or buy an XP book) and read about the
encryption feature (e.g. page 490 of Windows XP Inside Out), before you use
it. Keys and certificates are not Properties of a file. By reading the
instructions first, you will know why and how to export your encryption
certificate/key. Second, use a backup program like MS Backup, to backup the
entire contents of your disk. You can use the MS Backup program to safely
keep a backup of either (a) your original document, or (b) both the
encrypted document and the decoder ring.
When I click on properties, cant find any certificate listed. Must be doing
something wrong.. Help