Hello,
I am new to this, so please bear with me. I have installed GPG4Win just to do symmetric encryption, i.e., without exchanging public keys. Just a password attached to the encrypted file meets my needs. It works perfectly.
Now I am preparing for the next step – to use it directly within an email system. I have 2 choices: use GPGOL (for Microsoft Outlook on Windows) or Claws.
Regardless (although I am leaning to Claws) I know I will need to use key pairs with people whom I will be emailing with and who also have GPG. I know where to export my public key. But where is my Privatye Key? I understand it’s “just there” and KLEO will handle it all for me, which is fine.
But I need to backup my Key Pair and I can’t seem to find this feature within KLEO. I recall that during the first installation, towards the end, KLEO asked me to do a backup of my Key Pair – and I did. But I can’t seem to remember where I copied the backup to – it must be to some USB flash drive.
Is there a way to do another backup of my existing Key Pair, rather than generate a new one? This is because I’ve already sent out my Public Key to 2 or 3 persons.
Thanking you in advance.
Sincerely,
R. Tan
AFAIK there is no private key with symmetric encryption. There’s just the one public key that both encrypts and decrypts. So it’s unsuitable for email encryption which uses asymmetric encryption. In that case your public key only encrypts and your private key decrypts, so your public key can be circulated to others for them to send encrypted emails to you, which.you can then decrypt with your private key.
Thank you Mr Benson – I understand everything you’ve stated in your response.
I am preparing to use Claws email or Microsoft Outlook. When I get to that, I will be using my public key for others to encrypt emails to send to me, and then my private key will atuomatically decrypt these emails to me. That is clear.
I just want to know how I can get a backup of my key pair – which was already generated for me by KLEO on the day I installed GPG, and even backed up somewhere that I unfortunately cannot locate. Is there a way to back up my key pair?
Thanks for your efforts.
Sincerely
R.Tan
Yes, just right-click the relevant key in Kleopatra and choose Export Secret Keys.
Thank you very much Ms. Kim Nilsson. Much appreciated. My PC runs Windows and I did NOT see any pick from KLEO to “Export Secret Key”.
However, I did find a pick to “Backup Secret Key”. I assume for the moment Backup and Export are the same. So I ran “Backup Secret Key”.
It seemed tohave worked – but KLEO never prompted me for a destination directory/filename. So my question is, where did the Backup/Export go?
I have attached a PDF file containing 3 screenshots of this experience.
Thanking you for your guidance.
KLEO screenshots.pdf (212 KB)
AFAIK ‘back-up’ and ‘exporting’ your keys amount to the same thing. I’ve not used Kleopatra to do this, but have always used the ‘gpg’ command line The important key to export is your private key.
Click on ‘Start Menu’ and enter cmd in ‘search program/files’ box. Then click ‘cmd.exe’ shown at top. A prompt opens up with the path to your username. Then enter the command line: gpg --export-secret-keys -a “Ramon Tan”>mypriv.key. You are asked for your passphrase so enter it. After a few seconds of thinking about it, your file ‘mypriv.key’ is created in C:\Users\username. You should then move it offline to a USB drive or external HDD for safekeeping.
In File Explorer go to: %appdata%
In there you will find a folder: gnupg
In there there is: private-keys-v1.d
In there are your private keys.
They are protected with your passphrase but saving them in that form is not a bad idea.
You can include that folder (or maybe better still the whole gnupg folder) in your regular backups.
If you forget your passphrase they won’t help you but as a regular backup of your private keys I think this is ideal.
In File Explorer go to: %appdata%
In there you will find a folder: gnupg
In there there is: private-keys-v1.d
In there are your private keys.
They are protected with your passphrase but saving them in that form is not a bad idea.
You can include that folder (or maybe better still the whole gnupg folder) in your regular backups.
If you forget your passphrase they won’t help you but as a regular backup of your private keys I think this is ideal.
I don’t see the same as you.
I am immediately prompted where I want to save my file.
Usually applications pick the default “download” directory, or “home” folder of your user.