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I started getting a strange message when I start my computer. An icon appears in the system tray, and a popup tells me "Encrypting file system - Back up your file encryption key".
I know what EFS is, but I don't use it. To my knowledge, I don't have any encrypted files on my partition. I have searched using Total Commander on all the partitions for files that have the "encrypted" attribute, but I found nothing. So I don't have any encrypted files.
Does anyone know what I did to get this message?
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Windows 8.1 Pro with Update 1 here! I got this yesterday, shortly after changing the theme in Notepad++. I'm not sure if it's related somehow. But it seems plausible. There is at least one TechNet user with the same symptoms. My theme did get saved in Notepad++ however. I didn't have to change folder permissions, but this does seem very odd. I searched wide and far, and I found no encrypted folders or files on any partition. But I did backup the encryption key.
– Samir – 2014-11-02T13:57:46.1131This one helped me to solve it: Happened here on a Windows 2012 Server (non-R2) when I created a table via an SQL script in SQL Server Management Studio 2016 (SSMS). It created an encrypted file "C:\Users\MyUser\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Backup Files\Solution1~AutoRecover.~vs6EE1.sql" – Uwe Keim – 2017-03-07T16:16:36.427
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See also this qustion posted for Vista http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11699/efs-encryption-key-pop-up, but this answer worked for me for Windows 7 to determine the encrypted file. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11699/efs-encryption-key-pop-up/232734#232734
– goodeye – 2011-10-14T04:21:23.5471I saw this prompt on Windows 8 today as well. – Drew Noakes – 2013-11-04T10:03:09.930