When I get back to Toronto in a few days I'll check a few places where an older version of the file might be. Ditto for the keyring. I have some hopes that I will get hold of a sufficiently old version of the file and of gpg to decrypt it that way. We'll see.
I managed to locate two partial versions of the missing file, from which I could reconstruct most of it. Still no idea about what went wrong, but given that the partial versions decrypted without problem, my guess is a disk error or something of the sort that corrupted the encrypted file, which was then propagated to all my backups. Moral of the Story (one moral among many): Keep static time-stamped backups as well as current redundant copies. Will implement a scheme to do so this week, a better New Year's resolution than most! Thanks to all who offered suggestions. -- Peter King peter.king@utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-978-3311 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42