Ok, so I had created multiple key pairings successfully and was communicating just fine for weeks. I’m dumb, I ended up having somebody tell me they couldn’t communicate because they were using an older version and I fucked up everything.
Long story shot, I went into Kleopatra and highlighted all my key pairings and just pressed delete. Thinking I could create a new one and just start from scratch. Well now I get an error when I try to create a backup and the key that is created doesn’t even show up in Kleopatra.
I know I’m probably barely making sense, I will attach a screenshot of the error I am getting. Did not have this issue before.
usually you should have a backup from important files of your computer.
If you do, you should be able to just use the files from the last backup
(that should be in %APPDATA%\gnupg for a standard setup).
Otherwise what you describe could be defect, because you should be able to just create new keypairs after deleting all of them. See Command line operations at https://wiki.gnupg.org/TroubleShooting and try there to list all pubkeys with some more diagnostic settings, e.g. try
gpg -v --list-keys
to see what it tells you.
If this works, try more command line operations, this is the technical way to see if the backend is operating properly, and it can sometimes give better diagnostic messages.
Thanks for the responses guys. I uploaded a screen shot of what I’m seeing when I follow your instructions. Does this look correct?
I know that I’m not helpful, as I am not all that technical. There is a folder called “openpgp-revocs.d” where new files are being places that looks like a fingerprint maybe which would correspond to a certificate (does that make sense?).
If this is working as intended how would I go about retrieving my public and private keys when using the cmd lines?
This is not working as intended. You have the bad luck to run into a very rare issue. Our development ticket for this is: https://dev.gnupg.org/T4159
I will mention that you have also seen this issue in the report.
All will be fixed if you start from scratch:
Restart your Windows to ensure that all gnupg related processed are shut down.
Rename %APPDATA%\gnupg to %APPDATA%\gnupg_bkp
Start Kleopatra and generate a new keypair
(%APPDATA% expands to something like c:\users\steve\AppData\Roaming )