Jungle Disk Not Backing Up EFS Encrypted Files

November 20, 2009 – 4:14 PM

I’ve been using SyncToy to back up data to an external USB drive and then using Jungle Disk to back up the data to Amazon S3.  With the newest version of SyncToy (2.1) they fixed a bug for EFS and now files retain their encryption when copied to an NTFS drive.  This all of a sudden was causing errors (“Access is Denied”, of course) in Jungle Disk and it stopped backing up my files.  After snooping around a bit, I saw that the service runs as the “Local Service” account and this account obviously will not have your certificate in it’s Store to be able to access the files.  There’s a quick and easy solution and that is to change the account that the service logs in with to the account that has the files encrypted:

(Start -> Run -> services.msc -> Find the Jungle Disk service, double-click, go to the Log On tab)

Apply and restart the service and you should now be able to back up your encrypted files.