[DiscoverYellow]

Here is what happened:
0. While I have my Z30 encrypted, I have also decided to amp up my privacy and set the settings to also encrypt the SD card with my pictures.

1. When it was time to move pictures to my laptop and like I have done in the past: I hooked up USB cable to my Z30 and tapped the access card on the pop-up prompt.

2. I navigated to the "/camera" folder and habitually did ctrl+A / ctrl+X and ctrl+V to a folder on my laptop. (And in retrospect this was my mistake to trust that BB will reliably transfer photos rather then just copy them first.) The transfer went fast and smooth.

3. Safely disconnected the Z30 via device manager only after to find out that none of the photos open. There was an error along the lines of unsupported file format.

4. I decided to put the pictures back to the Z30 SD card. And repeated the USB connection, cut/paste sequence in reverse.

5. Safe disconnect again and find a pop-up on the Z30 that encryption will begin in 5 minutes. I navigated to the pictures and none were in the pictures app. While I was fumbling with the file manager app to locate the "/camera" folder on the SD card I also glimpsed into the encryption settings to see the process start and practically end in front of my eyes. (I remember the SD card taking a lot-lot-lot longer to encrypt before, so my guess only the pictures I put back on the card were being encrypted.)

6. I find that the pictures are no longer opening on the Z30 either. I get an icon of a flower with a small icon of a ripped document in the lower right corner.

Any suggestions as to what can be done now?

Also: I was able to recover the photos on my laptop with un-delete software, but they are the same photos I could not open to begin with. At least they are before I put them back to BB version.

[baarn]

1. When it was time to move pictures to my laptop and like I have done in the past: I hooked up USB cable to my Z30 and tapped the access card on the pop-up prompt.

2. I navigated to the "/camera" folder and habitually did ctrl+A / ctrl+X and ctrl+V to a folder on my laptop. (And in retrospect this was my mistake to trust that BB will reliably transfer photos rather then just copy them first.) The transfer went fast and smooth.
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Any suggestions as to what can be done now?

Whilst BlackBerry made it super easy to enable media card encryption it does depend on the user understanding the implications of such a significant change. See the following link.

http://support.blackberry.com/kb/art...mber=000025484

Transferring the files in mass storage mode was exactly the wrong thing to do. Your second mistake was cut-pasting instead of copy-paste-verify-delete.

IMO, since the whole media card is encrypted mass storage mode becomes redundant. BlackBerry 10 should ideally disable mass storage mode when media card encryption is enabled.

In any case, if you don't have a BlackBerry link backup or cloud backup of the pictures, then I'm sorry to tell you that they are almost certainly lost. The files you copied back are now encrypted twice with the same key, but turning off encryption will only decrypt them once.