How to Recover Photos from Encrypted Hard Drive?

Encrypting our important data, including photos, is a very important process to prevent them from unauthorized access. By encrypting the important data on your device using native tools, such as BitLocker, it became inaccessible to anyone without the appropriate encryption key. It can be difficult to retrieve photos from an encrypted hard drive. However, if you don’t have encryption key or facing problem while recovering files from an encrypted hard drive, then you need to take some additional steps to access them. 

Here, in this article, we will discuss various methods to know how to recover photos from Encrypted hard drive easily.

Why It Is Important to Encrypt Hard Drive?

You may be wondering how encrypting the hard drive can help you to prevent your photos from unauthorized access. Encryption is important in several ways such as:

• Data Security: Encrypting a hard drive protects your data from unauthorized access. When someone tries to access your device’s hard drive without your permission, the encrypted data remains inaccessible until they provide the encryption key or password. This prevents your sensitive information, such as personal files, financial data, or confidential documents, from them.
• Protection against data breaches: Data breaches have become common nowadays and unauthorized access to personal or sensitive information can put you in trouble. To prevent your important documents from identity theft, financial loss, or reputational damage, encryption creates an extra security layer. This prevents your documents from hackers or anyone who can exploit the data by breaching security measures.
• Disposal of hard drives: If you want to dispose your hard drive or sell it to anyone, try to encrypt it first. This protect all your data from being accessed by unauthorized individuals. When you encrypt the drive, no one will ever be able to retrieve the files from the drive without your permission or the encryption key.

Possible Reasons for Losing Photos from Encrypting Hard Drive  

Before we proceed with the methods to recover deleted photos from encrypted hard drives, it is important to find the exact reasons for such data loss issues. Given below are some main reasons for losing data from your encrypted hard drive:

• Losing or forgetting the encryption key or password: Instances may occur when you lose or forget your encryption key or password required to decrypt the drive and access the data. In such cases, you will be unable to decrypt the drive and retrieve your data.
• Software or hardware failure: There may be some hardware or software issues with your storage device, including a hard drive that can cause data loss issues. Mainly such problems arise because of any problem with your device OS, disk errors, file system corruption, or physical damage. 
• Virus or malware attacks: Malicious software or virus may affect the integrity of the data stored on your device, even if it is an encrypted hard drive. If your computer became infected with malware or viruses, it may cause issues like data corruption on loss on that storage drive. 
• Accidental deletion or formatting: You may have accidentally deleted data or formatted your encrypted hard drive. If you don’t have any backup, your data will be lost permanently.
• Physical damage or theft: Any sort of physical damage to your hard drive, such as dropping it or exposing it to extreme temperature and humidity. Similarly, if your hard drive is lost, you may lose access to that encrypted data.

These are some common scenarios that cause deletion or sudden loss of pictures on your encrypted hard drive. To minimize the risk of photo loss from your encrypted hard drive, try taking regular backups of your data to a separate and safe location.

How do I Decrypt the Encrypted Hard Drive?

You need the correct encryption key or passphrase to decrypt an encrypted hard drive. The specific method for decrypting a hard drive depends on the algorithm you are using or the encryption software you used. Before you proceed with the picture recovery methods, try to decrypt your hard drive using the following methods:

Method 01: Try to Obtain Encryption Key

All you need is to try decrypting your encrypted hard drive using the encryption key or passphrase. This key is crucial and needs to be protected from unauthorized access. When you enable Bitlocker encryption on your device, it will ask whether you need any backup by saving it to the account/a USB/a file or printing it. So, try starting with these places first. 

Method 02: Decrypt the Drive Using the Control Panel

If you don’t have the encryption key secured anywhere, you can use Control Panel to recover lost pictures from the encrypted hard drive. All you have to do is:

• Log in to your system’s administrator account and launch Control Panel.
• Now, click on “System and Security”, and then select the “BitLocker Drive Encryption” option. 

• From the list of encrypted drives that appear on the screen, select the drive that you need to decrypt and click the “Turn off BitLocker” option.
• After that, click on the “Decrypt Drive” button from the pop-up that appears and wait till Windows recover data from the encrypted drive.

Method 03: Decrypt Using Certificates

Another simple way to decrypt your encrypted hard drive and delete photo recovery from it is by using the certificate for that encrypted hard drive. Go through the following steps for deleted photo recovery using the certificate:

• Search for “certmgr.msc” in the search box located on your desktop and press the Enter key.
• Open Certificate Manager, and then click the Personal folder from the left navigation pane.

• Right-click on All Tasks, then tap the Import button and go through the on-screen instructions till you get the Certificate Import Wizard.

Once you are done with the above steps, launch the software and apply the steps as appear on your screen to recover lost picture from encrypted Hard drive.

Recover Photos from Encrypted Hard Drive Using Photo Recovery Tool

If you fail to recover lost photos from an encrypted hard drive using the above methods, then try using Stellar Photo Recovery software. It is an all-in-one 100% safe and secure picture recovery software to recover your lost, deleted, locked, or inaccessible photos. The software is easy-to-use and allows you to restore your deleted photos in a few simple steps. 

Check on the following deleted photo recovery steps to get your deleted images back using the Stellar Photo Recovery software:

• Download and install the Stellar Photo Recovery software on your device and from the home-page, select the location from where you need to recover deleted photos. Click Scan to continue.

• Once the scanning process gets completed, preview the recoverable photos from the Preview window. 

• Select the required photos, videos, and audio files that you need to recover and click Recover to save them at the desired location.

Wrapping Up

Hope, the above steps help you to know how to recover photos from an Encrypted hard drive. If you are anyhow able to decrypt your hard drive, it will be easy to restore deleted data from it. For those who have lost their encryption key, try using professional photo recovery software such as Stellar Photo Recovery to recover lost photos from the encrypted hard drive.