Duplicate personal key in keyring

[Justin Hibbits]

Hi DIrk,

(Not subscribed to the list, so copied initial reply.  Top-posting so
mail readers will more easily filter)

My backup was simply a full copy of my .gnupg directory, so that I
could easily just destroy the new one and restore if anything failed.

I'll try your suggestion, thanks!

- Justin


Hello Justin.

Am Montag, den 21.05.2018, 11:25 -0500 schrieb Justin Hibbits:
> Through some unknown series of events, I now have two copies of my
> personal gpg key in my keyring.  I double-checked to see if GPG is
> seeing the same key in two keyrings (maybe reading a backup), but
> both
> keys are being read from the same keyring.

> This leads me to two questions:

> 1) How could this happen in the first place?

I had a similar problem a while ago. In my case the key database was
corrupted.


> 2) How can I fix this, short of generating a new key and revoking the
> existing key?

In my case I exported the public and the private keys of my own keys,
then exported the complete public key ring, both ascii armored.

Then I simply deleted the key database file(s) and re-imported the
exports.

GPG imports keys only once, so the duplicates should vanish when re-
importing.

> I've tried backing up the keyring and deleting one copy, but it
> deleted both copies.  I searched online for anyone else who had a
> similar issue, and came up empty, except for one person who was
> seeing the same key from two files.

Did you make an ascii armored export, or what kind of Backup do you
mean?

Regards,
Dirk