Backup your house too. 
The lesson is: Test your backups, on a completely different computer. Preferable with a different OS.
A backup that does not get tested is not a good backup.
Perhaps backup your car…?
Careful you might run over the dogma if you don’t check the rear camera. 
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Thanks for all your help guys, and the humour. I thought I was one of these super cautious types with backups of backups and I still got caught. I didn’t even know about EFS. No good backing up a copy and finding you can’t open it.
On a serious note though, apparently if you copy encrypted files from EFS (which requires NTFS) to a non-NTFS filesystem, they will be decrypted. So files copied to a NAS running Samba or a cloud backup would not be encrypted.
Yes, I think I picked that up from one of your earlier links. My external backups are NTFS. If I had known that the [Encrypted] box had been ticked I could have handled it okay. It was the not knowing that was the problem. That won’t happen again.
Thanks again for your help. I think you were onto it right from the start.
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