Hard disk encryption

dlockers

dlockers

dlockers

Soldato
Joined
21 Jan 2010
Posts
24,890
Hi folks,

Not sure if this is the right place, but a lad in the watch thread was burgled. They left his gaming pc thankfully but it made me consider if my own pc was stolen. The hard disk is a treasure trove of nudies and family photos.

Is hard disk encryption plausible for a gaming pc or does the overhead really cause issues?

My work laptop, like many of ours, is encrypted and slow as sin despite being an i7. Presumably this is software not just bitlocker causing an issue?

Any recommendations? Thanks
 
First thing would be
Hopefully you have backups
Of all the important stuff

Are we talking more than 1 drive in there?
If so could you just encrypt the one with
Your important stuff?

I have used bitlocker before
Didn't seem to cause gaming issues for me
What did cause issues
Was bitlocker malfunctioning
And locking me out
Despite me saving the key
It wouldn't let me back in

I had 9 drives encrypted
Had to format the lot
And use off site backups to restore them

Now it might be rare to happen
But from personal experience bitlocker can fail/screw up

Does your work laptop have a solid state drive?
I7 with a mechanical drive would still be slow
Could be many other reasons
It's slow as sin
 
Shouldn't cause any issues if you enable Bitlocker on your PC, the other way is create some password protected .7z / .zip files that contain all your sensitive stuff and not not enable BitLocker.
 
Just make sure you have a copy of the bitlocker recovery key. I did a bios update on my MB and this was enough for bitlocker to ask for the key. You can print it or save to your Microsoft account.

You can backup with Macrium Reflect and encrypt the backup also.
 
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A separate disk that is encrypted seems like a great option. It is literally just photos etc. that I'd never, ever want in public domain. They are all backed up to OneDrive anyway (lols complete trust in MS). That way I never have to worry about gaming performance impact etc.

Thanks all!
 
Or just use veracrypt.. which is an encrypted file container.. i.e. a file on your PC, that you then mount with a password, and it acts like a normal drive. The performance is also very good for what it is, I have all our client SQL databases in a veracrypt file, and the performance overhead is negiligible.

Once created and mounted it works just like a separate hard drive in your PC.

I have quite a few veracrypt files, and i've copied them between pc's and hard drives over the years.. and never had any issues with it failing..

You can even set it up, with a double blind password, so that if you are forced to enter a password.. you enter the double blind one, and it only shows as a drive with whatever files you put in when you setup the double blind drive.. where as the "real" password gets you your files back. (i'm not for a moment saying you need this! :) )

edit: one of my colleagues uses bitlocker, and he's had issues moving between PC's such that he's lost files in the past.
 
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