Windows Bitlocker

[Pad]

I've been thinking about using the Windows Bitlocker feature to encrypt my PC. Before launching into it I'd be interested in hearing the experiences of anyone who is using it. So questions like:

1. Love it or hate it?
2. What do you encrypt? OS drive only, data drives only, all drives or just certain folders?
3. Does it slow your machine down?
4. If you decide you don't like it, is it easy to remove bitlocker and decrypt all your drives/folders etc?
5. Have you used other encryption software and how does it compare with Bitlocker?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

TIA

[ant1dote]

For my job, we encrypt all of the hard drives in the laptops 100%. I have not seeing any slow downs, we ripped out the original HDs and replaced them with SSDs because we thought this was going to slow down mechanical drives. But we have a few with 7200 RPM with no issues.

As long as you have the key/password you can remove bitlocker.

[Pad]

OK. So I want to encrypt my data drives with Bitlocker - it seems easy enough to do - but there is one big problem as I see it - the length of time it will take. I have two 6Tb drives and one 4 Tb drive that I want to encrypt. From what I've read that will probably take a couple of weeks (possibly more) to encrypt them all, because Bitlocker will have to encrypt the entire drive as the drives are already full of data. That is a non runner.

However, I understand that Bitlocker is very quick at encrypting empty drives. Once the empty drive is encrypted and new data is added, the new data is automatically encrypted. So I'm wondering if it would be a good work-around to format the drives I want to encrypt first - thereby wiping all data, encrypt with Bitlocker, and then copy my data back onto the encrypted drive?

My idea is that it would be quicker to copy the data to an already encrypted drive - (although that would still take a bit of time), than encrypting all the data on the existing drive.

I'd be interested in hearing views, particularly if you have experience with Bitlocker.

TIA

[evenings7]

Originally Posted by Pad

My idea is that it would be quicker to copy the data to an already encrypted drive - (although that would still take a bit of time), than encrypting all the data on the existing drive.

Bitlocker.

TIA

based on how it works, it would be the same no matter how you do it.

Depending on the hardware and level of encryption it will always be different for each person doing it but to get the best idea possible i would test out both of your ideas/methods first and see which one is faster.

(External drives/devices will be slower to encrypt than internal drives, so also include this in your test.)

[ww345]

myself, i wouldn't really trust a program like that to microsoft unless you were fine with them snooping on you

[Pad]

Originally Posted by evenings7

based on how it works, it would be the same no matter how you do it.

Depending on the hardware and level of encryption it will always be different for each person doing it but to get the best idea possible i would test out both of your ideas/methods first and see which one is faster.

(External drives/devices will be slower to encrypt than internal drives, so also include this in your test.)

Hehe!! Funny you should say that, I've done a couple of tests since my last post as follows:

I had an old 2Tb drive collecting dust on the shelf, so I installed it in my PC and formatted the disc to make it totally blank. I ran Bitlocker on it and it encrypted the disc in a matter of seconds. I then did a copy and paste of about 500Gigs from my main storage drive to the encrypted disc. As far I can tell the transfer rate wasn't affected at all by the Bitlocker encryption. It took about 1 hour 30 minutes to transfer the data - which is pretty much what I'd expect between two unencrypted discs on my machine. So I'm looking at about 10 to 12 hours to transfer and encrypt all my data that way. Maybe a bit longer as I'll be using a file syncing program to transfer the data rather than a straight copy & paste.

I also did a full disc encryption of a 32Gig USB Flash drive, i.e. encrypting every sector regardless of whether it contains data. That took almost an hour for just 32Gigs!!! While it goes without saying that a USB drive will be a lot slower than a disc drive - that is pretty atrocious.

I then set about decrypting the 2Tb drive which now had 500Gigs data on it. after about 3 hours I gave up as it was still chugging away decrypting the data. I just shut the machine down to stop the decryption, rebooted and formatted the drive again.

So it is pretty clear to me that it is much faster to encrypt a blank drive and add data to it, than it is to encrypt a drive full of data.

Originally Posted by ww345

myself, i wouldn't really trust a program like that to microsoft unless you were fine with them snooping on you

Well from what I've read Bitlocker, it seems to be a pretty well respected product. It's not perfect by any means - like any other product it has it's pros and cons. But none of the cons I've come across would indicate it is a snooping platform. Windows 10 is already out the door with snoop-dawgs the biggest probably being Cortana. Most of the snoop stuff can actually be turned off. I'm not worried about Bitlocker from that point of view.

[Pad]

Well I've Bitlocked my main Data drive. After formatting it took a couple of minutes to Bitlock it, and just under 8 hours to transfer all my data (4Tb) back from my backup drive. Pretty easy really. Now I've just got to do the same process on 3 other drives.

It's nice to know nobody can access my data once my machine is switched off.