Bitlocker question

[str0ppy]

My current setup is a one 1TB drive with a 120GB partition for the operating system and the other remaining partition for data. I also have a removable 500GB drive.

I am planning on encrypting only the data partition with Bitlocker and probably the removable drive, leaving the OS partition unencrypted.

I'm not desperate to have the tightest security possible (as you can probably tell), but if my PC was stolen, I wouldn't want anyone to access my data.

Have I potentially achieved this by doing the above?

Thanks.

 

[CaptainCrash]

I'm not desperate to have the tightest security possible (as you can probably tell), but if my PC was stolen, I wouldn't want anyone to access my data.

This statement is a bit self-contradictory... without knowing the level of competence of whoever nicks your PC (or whoever it ends up with), you can't know what level of security is necessary or appropriate.

The method you're proposing is *probably* sufficient in most cases, but as I'm sure you know, Windows tends to splatter temporary data around the OS partition, where it *might* be recoverable to someone with the right knowhow. If you're bothered enough about security to be using encryption in the first place, you may as well do the job properly, which means encrypting the system volume... it's pretty easy with Bitlocker, and the performance overhead is negligible on any halfway decent kit.

 

[str0ppy]

This statement is a bit self-contradictory... without knowing the level of competence of whoever nicks your PC (or whoever it ends up with), you can't know what level of security is necessary or appropriate.

The method you're proposing is *probably* sufficient in most cases, but as I'm sure you know, Windows tends to splatter temporary data around the OS partition, where it *might* be recoverable to someone with the right knowhow. If you're bothered enough about security to be using encryption in the first place, you may as well do the job properly, which means encrypting the system volume... it's pretty easy with Bitlocker, and the performance overhead is negligible on any halfway decent kit.

Thanks.

Trouble is, I remotely access my PC quite a lot and would never be able to reboot it if I had the system drive encrypted. If you are saying that the only risk is temp data on the system partition then I think I could probably live with that. I will have to think about it, but for the moment I think I will just turn BL on with the data partitions.

I know that you can pause and resume encryption in BL. If I paused it and then rebooted, would I be able to carry on without any issues? I reckon a pretty full TB drive would take a while to encrypt. What would happen if the power was cut off unexpectedly?

Thanks again.