Short story version: use the CIPHER command.

I had a 3-2-1 backup fail on me recently."

“21,684 files could not be copied”.

The original files were EFS encrypted.  Here’s a picture of what was going wrong:

In technical terms, the second computer did not have the EFS decryption key.  The easy fix was to remove the EFS encryption via the CIPHER command:

cipher /a /d /s:<directory name>

where:

• /a is all files, including subdirectories
• /d is decrypt
• /s: is the directory name.
  ie. d:\users\wisefaq\downloads

To bulk encrypt, you just need to replace the /d with /e
ie. cipher /a /e /s:<directory name>

Note: the cipher command will fail if the files have the READ-ONLY flag set (ie. remove the flag first)

Related posts:

Operating ROBBAS Deleting those files forever. Another nail in the coffin of the RC4 cipher

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