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I have backed up my EFS certificate (.pfx) along with the password I used for it. And then I followed this tutorial to restore it which seemed pretty straight forward. I didn't encounter any errors when restoring the certificate. However, when I try to access the encrypted files, it shows this message:

enter image description here

Is there anything else I'm missing?

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  • Why did you delete the original certificate from the store? It sounds like you exported the wrong certificate. When you created the certificate did you backup the certificate at that time?
    – Ramhound
    Commented Apr 26 at 23:59
  • @Ramhound I did not delete the original certificate, I formatted the laptop and reinstalled Windows. I attached the generated certificate along with the password on my password manager as soon as I enabled EFS.
    – user9564371
    Commented Apr 27 at 0:03
  • You obviously didn’t export the correct certificate otherwise you would be able to decrypt the file. However, are you sure this isn’t a permission problem? Post the ACL for the file, that should provide, enough information to diagnose your issue.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Apr 27 at 0:12
  • I figured it out! Thank yo for your comment, it made me double check and realize I was using the certificate generated from a different laptop. (They were the same model so I accidentally named them the same in my password manager)
    – user9564371
    Commented Apr 27 at 0:15

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I wasn't doing anything wrong in terms of the procedure, I just mixed up the certificate I was using. Thanks to @Ramhound's comments that made me double check.

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