Windows 8 Bitlocker usage
August 5th, 2016
Moved from Off-Topic to Helpdesk.
I use it on windows 7 both at home and at work and it doesn’t affect the speeds of anything or your activation. You just need to put in a password (it’s actually optional) to access the drives.
would it affect: dual boot, win8 activation, speed?
Well, Some bootloaders don’t play well with each other, So can’t say without knowing
which one your using. Same goes for activation, I’ll need to know which activator you used.
And yes it does affect the speed, But your hardly gonna notice it (Unless you have an SSD, Then you might)
Edit Which OS’s are you dual booting exactly? All of em Windows ones?
Do you guys recommend using ?
No.
There are better programs out there, And besides, Microsoft is the largest software
monopoly in the world, Do you really wanna trust em with encryption?
Who knows if they haven’t implemented any backdoors in it!
Truecrypt has long been the de-faco standard:
http://www.truecrypt.org/
The only downside is that it doesn’t support encrypting an OS partition that uses
the GPT partition table. But GPT is only essential if it’s larger than 2TB (And most people
wouldn’t need an OS partition that large anyhow) but if yours is already using GPT
and you can’t be bothered to reformat, You could use bestcrypt volume encryption
instead which does support it:
Bestcrypt Volume Encryption
App:
http://www.jetico.com/bcve_setup.exe
Crack: http://www.fileswap.com/dl/s4Fikb1R0j/
Pass = abc331
Do not reboot after installation and check install.txt
Also, Keeping backup is extremely important, Don’t underestimate it!
If you lose your password you are effectively screwed and the data will be lost!
So you should definitely backup your data first. You could encrypt an external
HDD and keep it there, You could also rent a safe deposit box and place it there (or
a secondary external) and just take it out every now and then for updating. Online
backup is another option if the data is not too big and you got a good enough upload speed.
Spideroak is pretty solid. Also, If your gonna encrypt multiple partitions, It’s best practice
to use a different password for each (But I guess using the same one would be okay as long
as it’s strong enough) Make your password/s are at least 20 chars in length and contain a mix of lowercase/uppercase/special characters, Numbers would be good too. And remember this, Your passwords are only secure inside of your mind! Do not use a password you can’t remember and don’t write em down on paper either! Anyways, If your gonna encrypt your OS partition, You’ll be prompted for the password each time you power up your computer. If your gonna encrypt other partitions as well, Then you’ll have to manually mount em from the encryption app after windows has already loaded. There are different approaches to encryption, Fully encrypting all partitions is not the only solution. For example, You could encrypt only your data partitions and leave the OS one un-encrypted while still achieving good privacy, Which can be accomplished the following way:
1. Always save your important documents/data into an encrypted partition.
2. Install & use portable apps of your most commonly used Internet applications onto an
encrypted partition. All popular ones have portable versions (Such as Firefox/Skype/Pidgin/Kvirc) A portable app keeps it’s settings/cache/history on-site (And not in the appdata folder or registry like ordinary ones) so as long as the partition with the portable apps is unmounted, No one will be able to look into your Internet activities or get a hold of your saved passwords! (better make a format and clean install of your OS if going this route)
3. Wipe the free space of your OS partition to be on the safe side (Will remove traces of all previously deleted files) BCWipe is good for that:
http://2baksa.net/news/89934/
It can also wipe windows history (recent docs, search history and stuff like that)
and encrypt the swap file as well (Very useful for this scenario, Less important when using full disk encryption) I’d also like to mention that some apps can be set not to keep file history (such as Winrar/Foxit reader/Xnview)
Hope you find this info useful.
Thanks, VERY helpful!
Using encryption on your os drive is a terrible idea, The vast majority of the files will be the operating system and programs.
Instead use folder redirection to store just your files on an encrypted drive.
http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/terminal-services/performance/configure-folder-redirection.html