Last night I got a phone call from one of my relatives.  He told me that he accidentally encrypted some of his files a while back and since then his computer crashed and he had to re-install windows. The problem now is he can’t access or decrypt the files.  After a little digging around I found that lots of people also have had this problem.

If you ever encrypted your files, I would suggest that you have a very good reason to do so. Once encrypted it is nearly impossible to decrypt them without the original user-name and password and security key and even then it can still be very tricky.

So a word of warning.

DO NOT ENCRYPT YOUR FILES UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE LETTING YOURSELF IN FOR.

Trust me, you will save yourself a lot of heart ache if those files were important to you. I imagine encrypting your files accidentally is actually quite easy if your intention was to compress the files. The proximity of theses two options are dangerously close.

Please tell me I am wrong on this one. I would like to know if there is a way of decrypting these files. Has anyone tried before and if so was you successful?