EFS Recovery – Problems with Ntbackup

Guillaume — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:49:32 +0000

If you are trying to perform EFS recovery by backing up encrypted files on a client machine and sending the backup file to a dedicated recovery workstation, remember this:

1) You need to be a local admin while performing the backup, and the restore, in order to back up the data stream even though you don’t have access to the encrypted files.

2) If a policy is disabling EFS on the recovery workstation, ntbackup won’t tell you that it can’t create the encrypted files because EFS is disabled. No. It will simply SKIP the files. So if you have files that get skipped, try to manually create a folder and encrypt it. It has to work else you will not be able to restore the backup properly..

Performance impact of clearing your swap file at shutdown

Guillaume — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 23:13:54 +0000

For security reasons, it might be advisable to clear your swap file at shutdown.

It doesn’t provide great security, and you really should be using full drive encryption anways.

But in case anyone is wondering, for a 1.5gig swap file, this option (ClearPageFileAtShutdown) seems to add about 30 to 40 seconds of time to the shutdown procedure as it overwrites the file with zeroes.

Now turn it back off and install Truecrypt!

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EFS Recovery – Problems with Ntbackup

Performance impact of clearing your swap file at shutdown