Quote from: pine on September 22, 2012, 08:49 pmYes, unless you made a back-up, then you're screwed. Sorry. No private key, no dice. Worse, if your pals won't believe you've changed your PGP key because you cannot email them your new PGP public key with a signature from the old private key, then you've lost your contacts there. Moral of the story: back-up your private keys! Maybe print them out someplace and hide them so if necessarily you can type them in if you lose your private key, it's up to you how it is done, I'm sure Guru has ideas about this.There's a program called paperkey that will extract the minimum amount of data from the private key necessary to recreate it (and by extension the public key). It's designed to allow printing and later OCR scanning and restoration of the private key.Paperkey is written by David Shaw (a big name GPG user/developer) and the program is here:http://www.jabberwocky.com/software/paperkey/