You know EFS is working when…

I little while ago I had to rebuild my laptop and when I did this I decided that I would encrypt my home directory. I have had a laptop stolen before and I will never really be sure what happened to the data on it. I figure that if I encrypt my home directory then at least all my data will be save if a thief removes the hard drive and tries to by pass the login. I decided that it was best to just encrypt the entire home directory so I would know that as long as all of my data was stored in my user folder it would be safe.

Oh, btw this is Windows 7 and EFS I am talking about.

So as part of rebuilding my laptop I needed to reinstall WAMP so I could set up a local copy of my website. This copy is stored in a folder in my Documents folder and not in the Apache ‘www’ folder. This all went fine and after it was all set up I tried to launch the local version of my website but I kept getting a PHP error that said I didn’t have permissions to view the page.

5 hours later…

After checking all the file permission, poking around the internet and Binging (ya, I don’t use Google) for a solution it finally occurred to me that the EFS file system may be the culprit. It turns out that WAMP service was running under the System account which does not have permissions to decrypt files under my user account. There are 2 solutions to this problem – change the user account that the WAMP service runs under or decrypt the folder. I choose the later and I also decided to stop being so paranoid and selectively decrypt folders in my home folder. Ya, like I need to encrypt my Downloads folder.

I also have my home directory on my Linux dev server encrypted but I have not tested to see if this would also be an issue there.

Hope this helps someone else from not wasting a Saturday afternoon. At least this confirms to me that EFS really does work.