Bit Locker!!

If my understanding is correct then bit locker sounds like a very dangerous thing to me:

If you enable bit locker and you system crashes and you can't get in to windows then you can't take your HDD out and put it in another machine to recover your data nor would using linux to recover it work?

So anything you don't have an up to date backup for would not be recoverable???

 

I'm actually not familiar with BitLocker, but if your synopsis is correct, that would explain why it is a business/enterprise feature, and not a home-user feature:

It's made for people who KEEP BACKUPS. As long as you keep a good backup in a secure location, it doesn't matter if the data on a hard drive is accessible or not, and it makes disposing of dead hardware that much easier, since they don't have to worry about shredding the files on an inaccessible drive.


EDIT: It also looks as if a volume using USB keyed entry would allow access as long as you could provide the key, quite possibly independent of the Windows installation.

EDIT 2: There are many enterprise-level users who would prefer that certain sensitive data simply be lost than that it be recoverable by the wrong people, so that's also worth considering.

 

But surely even the most careful don't make backups regularly enough to make it sensible to use this feature.

I make a backup of important stuff once a week (maybe twice a month if i'm busy). But there are occasions when all could be lost even if i did a daily backup.

A few years ago i was working on a tax return and switched my laptop off went home had some food and turned the laptop back on and it would not boot at all.

Now it wasn't a problem i just removed the drive, put it in an external enclosure and finished the return off on my desktop PC. But if bitlocker had been around then and i was using it, this could have been very costly.

 

Yes, but BitLocker is limited to Vista Enterprise and Vista Ultimate. Microsoft would probably have preferred to keep it out of Vista Ultimate to avoid complaints from people who use it and don't make backups, but they couldn't keep it out of Ultimate without getting complaints that they were cheating Ultimate users.

On the enterprise level, important files are backed up DAILY (and are also normally backed up to redundant servers). If you lose data, you have, at most, a few hours of overtime to re-enter it.

For home use where you're not making daily backups, use something like TrueCrypt to encrypt without computer-locking the volume.


From the sound of it, TrueCrypt is more secure, anyway. There are apparently ways to spoof keys to access a BitLocker volume.