Recovering an Online Backup Encryption Key

A complete loss of data can be an emotionally-charged situation for end users and Online Backup Service Providers, especially if the customer has forgotten his Encryption Key.

The customer’s hard drive may have crashed, or the computer may have been stolen. Perhaps the customer has phoned you, as the Service Provider, and is strongly demanding that you restore his data. He may consider it your sole responsibility to restore his data and may be blaming you for not being able to do so because he lost his encryption key. In a worst case, perhaps it WAS your responsibility to maintain your customer’s encryption key.

Both you and your customer know his files are safely stored on your RBS Server, and it can be upsetting to know that they are so close, yet out of reach because the Encryption Key has been lost. Often the customer’s business is adversely affected and the longer his files are lost the more upset he becomes.

RBackup is so secure that it is impossible for a Service Provider to recover files if a customer forgets his encryption key. (But there is hope. Please read on.) For this reason, we strongly recommend that your customers make a Key Disk during installation of their software, and that they record their encryption key on paper and keep it in a safe place. When the software is installed it prompts the user to make and store the Key File and to print the Key Report that it displays, and keep it in a safe place.

If you have the Key Report printed or the latest Key File you can recover the encryption key. If your customer does not remember his encryption key, and does not have the Key Report or the Key File, there is an alternative which can be used in emergencies.

RBackup is the only online backup software that has a built-in Key Escrow system. It can be activated or deactivated by the Service Provider. It is ON by default. This exclusive, highly secure triple-key cryptographic key recovery module allows RBS (and nobody else) to restore a client’s hopelessly lost encryption key.

Only RBS can do it, and only with approval from the customer, and only if your customer has not changed his Encryption Key without rebuilding his Key Escrow file. (The software prompts for rebuilding this file whenever the key is changed.)

To perform a key recovery operation we need some files from your client’s latest backup from your Server, a key file generated by your Server, and legal documents signed by your client and yourself authorizing us to recover the key.

The process requires the consent of your Client and yourself, and can only be done if the Service Provider has turned on the Key Escrow feature.

RBS alone cannot recover an encryption key without the consent of the client and the service provider.

Instead, we highly recommend that your client makes a Key Disk during installation of his software (which the software will ask him to do) and also print the Key Form, for which the software will prompt. This avoids the trouble and expense of using Key Escrow.

I hope you don’t need to recover data from a lost encryption key. But if you do, the following link contains information on the procedure.

http://help.remote-backup.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=41