For anyone who comes upon this thread in need of help, Active Directory is explained here:
Protecting Data by Using EFS to Encrypt Hard Drives
One issue we have is that we did back up the certificate/keys to external media and wrote down the password, but the password does not work. So it was either typed wrong or written down wrong, or perhaps the certificate file is corrupt.
Hang on - I think you are suggesting that the keys must be backed up themselves, not just restored through backup. However, couldn't we restore the backup to a different computer, export the keys, and then import them to the original computer?
You could try, for sure, but no guarantees it would work. You could definitely give the backup to another PC option a shot though.
Excellent! The restore of the backup to an alternate location did allow me to access and export my certificates / keys, and then importing them back into the laptop (not the restored backup) allowed me to access the files again!
So everything is up and running. Thanks again to everyone for all of the suggestions.
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