When dealing with encrypted data, it is often good practice to save the encyption key on a separate drive away from the database machine. This reason for this practice is to handle the scenario where if someone gained unauthorized access to the database machine, they would not be able to locate the encryption key.

The encryption key should be have the extension .4DKeyChain and located at the root of an external drive. Upon loading an encrypted 4D data file without the encryption key, the database will look something like the image below:



If an external drive is connected, 4D will automatically check the root directory for the correct encryption key and show the unencrypted data as shown below:



In summary, do not lose that thumb drive containing the encryption key.