Quote from: moksha on September 22, 2012, 04:14 amHi Pine\Guru\anyone! Hope I don't disrupt your debate, but I have a question I'm hoping doesn't sound too stupid.. Is there anyway I can import keys in my PGP program that I've since lost, but kept the public key? I've just realized a little too late that I'd deleted my previous keys and didn't realize I needed more than my public key\pass phrase to decrypt. Rookie error I know, I can see 'retrieve keys' but it asks for key ID and I'm not entirely sure what this is referring to. I apologize for my ignorance!By 'keys', I take it you know your own PGP keys and not other people's public keys.Yes, 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.If you store the private key away somewhere, don't worry about the public key, you can generate the public key form the private key later, this may make the private key harder to find.Your PGP key ID is a unique hex (base 16 instead of decimal) number that uniquely identifies your PGP key. (Note: when I say PGP key, I always mean your PGP key pair, both the public and private key, usually there is just one of each by default).P.S. Are you absolutely sure you deleted your private key? Maybe you just deleted a text file you may have had it in? You're sure it's gone from your key manager?