What is a reliable way to backup/restore my keys and test?

Werner Koch wk at gnupg.org
Mon Sep 19 08:55:35 CEST 2016


On Wed, 14 Sep 2016 17:10, duane at nofroth.com said:

> Once I have completed my OS upgrade how do I restore my keys and the
> trust levels assigned to them?

If you restore the backup of ~/.gnupg (with all sub directories) with
the right permissions (tar xpf) you should be done.  GnuPGnstores all
its data in a mahinve independet format and thus a copy of the directory
works on all platforms.

For cleanness, you may not want to exclude ~/.gnupg/random_seed from the
backup or delete that file from the target box after restoring.

> I use Thunderbird/Enigmail which is using gpg2 but I originally
> created my key pair using gpg 1.4.  Does this have any ramifications?

No.  If you start using gnupg 2.1 the secret keys will be automatically
migrated to the new format (the old secring.gpg will be kept but not
used by 2.1).


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner

-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.
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