restoring ~/.gnupg folder

[David Shaw]

On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 10:10:02AM -0600, Charles Howse wrote:

> I recently installed Fedora Core 1 and kgpg.  I generated a keypair
> and uploaded it to the mit keyserver.  Everything was working great.
>
>  I then fubar'd my Fedora install somehow, and decided the best
> option to fix it was to re-install Fedora.  Before I did that, I
> saved my ~/.gnupg directory to a cd, exported my key to a file, and
> generated a revocation certificate to a file.  After the re-install,
> I restored my ~/.gnupg directory from cd, and imported the saved
> key.
> 
> Apparently, that was a bad decision.  Now, when I try to import
> another key, say the Microsoft pgp key, it won't work because it
> can't find a writable keyring.

> Now to my questions:
> What is the proper way to save my secret key to a floppy?

gpg --export your_secret_key > /mnt/floppy/my_secret_key.gpg

> Can I recover from the present situation, and if so, how?

chmod 700 ~/.gnupg
chmod 600 ~/.gnupg/*

David