This may well be an easy question to answer. I am running Windows 7 Home Premium and my
hard disk's file system is set to NTFS which in theory should support EFS. However I've
read that EFS is only supported on Windows 7 Professional and up. In fact, when I
right-click on a file or folder and go to General -> Advanced... the option to encrypt
appears but is disabled (grayed out).
So, if I want to use NTFS encryption, can I boot Linux, mount the NTFS partition, and
encrypt/decrypt files using the EFS scheme from within Linux? Are there any tools that
allow me to do this? Of course, if I do this and I am running Windows 7 Home Premium
or below then I guess I won't be able to read those files or folders which are
encrypted, but I just wanted to know whether this is possible.
Alternatively, are there any addon tools which work on Windows which somehow provide
compatible functionality without upgrading via the Windows Anytime Upgrade
(WindowsAnytimeUpgradeUI.exe) facility? Given that the file system supports
the feature, it should just be a matter of running some compatible software
with administrator privileges to obtain the desired effect (of being able
to encrypt or decrypt files in an EFS-compliant manner). The following
Wikipedia article mentions something about this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypting_File_System#Other_operating_systems_.28e.g._Linux.29
What the Wikipedia article does not mention is if, by providing the appropriate
credentials or other means, such files actually become readable on Linux when
encypted.
Alternatively, given that Windows 8.1 (just like the recent OS X Mavericks), seems to be
free, can I just upgrade to Windows 8.1 and have this feature. My machine is 2 years old
and I would like to know whether the OS will be sluggish/run slower on such machine. I
would also like to know whether I can upgrade directly without having to reinstall,
thus preserving all my files without them having to reside on special partitions.
Thanks.
No comments:
Post a Comment