Tobias Holz wrote: > Hey Folks, > i successfully installed gnupg on my Win7 machine. I want to use it > with Thunderbird to encrypt personal eMails. > Now I've got some questions: > 1) What does happen if I lose my private key? Can I burn it to a CD/DVD?
If you lose your secret key or forget your passphrase and cannot recover them, you are toast. There is no way to recover either except from a backup copy. CD/DVD is one method. You may also want to take a look at paperkey, <http://www.jabberwocky.com/software/paperkey/>. While you are saving your secret key, generate a revocation certificate and save it with the key rings on the CD and/or print it out with the paperkey copy. You'll need it if you ever lose your secret key or forget your passphrase, and cannot recover either of them. > 2) Where can I find the key, I just got the passphrase? XP & earlier: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\GnuPG\ Vista & Windows 7: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\GnuPG\ The file you need to save is secring.gpg. The files are small enough, you should also save a copy of pubring.gpg and trustdb.gpg. > I generated the Keys with OpenPGP-Plugin for Thunderbird. I got the > public key (something_stands_here.asc) and encryption works fine :) Not heard of it that extension. Lots of folks use the Enigmail extension. "something_stands_here' is known as the key ID. There is no benefit to keeping it secret. It is also a good idea to send your key to the keyservers. -- John P. Clizbe Inet:John (a) Mozilla-Enigmail.org You can't spell fiasco without SCO. hkp://keyserver.gingerbear.net or mailto:pgp-public-k...@gingerbear.net?subject=help Q:"Just how do the residents of Haiku, Hawai'i hold conversations?" A:"An odd melody / island voices on the winds / surplus of vowels"
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