Solved Access my user account encrypted files from my admin account?

I have a set of folder I encrypted from my user account. I haven't figured out how to access them from my admin account.

In reverse, while logged on my admin account, I droppped some files into folder encrypted by my user account. I can't access those files when I log on as a user.

How can I get access to all my encrypted files regardless of which logon I use?

Umm...if you could access encrypted files from another user that would remove the whole point of encrypting the files to begin with.

Randysea said:

I have a set of folder I encrypted from my user account. I haven't figured out how to access them from my admin account.

In reverse, while logged on my admin account, I droppped some files into folder encrypted by my user account. I can't access those files when I log on as a user.

How can I get access to all my encrypted files regardless of which logon I use?

Click to expand...

Bearing in mind logicearth's valid point, I would imagine you would need to have a copy of the relevant files for each user account.

As a matter of curiosity, is there any particular reason why you need to use your admin account in addition to your user account?

You will need to add the other user to the files you want that account to access.

pallesenw said:

You will need to add the other user to the files you want that account to access.

Click to expand...

So how do I do that? I've seen explanations of exporting keys so encrypted files could be read on other machines, nothing about this situation.

As for the question from Logicearth, it's not any user I want to give access to, it's only me wearing my admin logon hat, so to speak.

As for the question from seavixen32: I mostly stay with my user account. But then you get some stupid program that has multiple modules. When the publisher releases an update, each module sends you through the dialog requesting an admin password. Sometimes it's even worse. The update or install is trying to access a location that requires admin access but all you get is an error message, not even a chance to put in an admin password. The simplest thing to do is do the update from an admin account.

Yesterday I was doing a long, slow software update that needed multiple user inputs and admin access. So I logged into an admin acct. While doing this, I needed some contact info that was in my encrypted data. It would have been really nice if RandyAdmin could access the same files on this machine as RandyUser without stopping the update to change the logon.

On the marked files, go to efs > details. Here you can add users. You can only do it on files, not on folders.

pallesenw said:

On the marked files, go to efs > details. Here you can add users. You can only do it on files, not on folders.

Click to expand...

Thank you, pallesenw. That was exactly what I was looking for.

It also makes perfect sense now that you've pointed me there. In this procedure, Windows looks at all available certificates on the computer and asks which ones I want to give access to the file. This would be like my importing my certificate to another computer so I could transfer encrypted files there. I just couldn't figure out how to do it here.

I hadn't seen this file access dialog before because I did not realize that the efs/details tab is only clickable for a single file at a time. It's greyed out if you select multiple files. Too bad. But for my purposes, there are probably fewer than a dozen encrypted user files I'm likely to want to access during an admin logon.