Partitions, OneDrive, Bitlocker = ?

[Crawford]

Hi,

Setting up a new laptop, which will be used mainly for work. Keen to check if the "layout" i have in mind is sensible, or really dumb.....

1. Creating two partitions of the 512GB SSD (OS, 200GB; Data, 312) and keeping my synced OneDrive on the Data partition.

2. Can Bitlocker encrypt the two partitions separately? (Does that mean two log-ins on start-up?)

3. Will OneDrive play nicely in an encrypted partition?

Sorry if this makes so sense. Was keen to get a first draft of the question out to the Hive Mind before have to run errands.....

 

[andshrew]

1. Creating two partitions of the 512GB SSD (OS, 200GB; Data, 312) and keeping my synced OneDrive on the Data partition.

There's nothing wrong with this doing, but 512GB is quite small so you may find splitting it makes it a bit annoying to manage your free space. Remember 512GB will be ~476GiB in terms of real space reported by the OS.

2. Can Bitlocker encrypt the two partitions separately? (Does that mean two log-ins on start-up?)

Yes, but you may need a Pro (or higher) version of Windows. You should be able to configure it to decrypt the second partition automatically or prompt for a password.

3. Will OneDrive play nicely in an encrypted partition?

Yes.

 

[Mujja]

Hi,

1. Creating two partitions of the 512GB SSD (OS, 200GB; Data, 312) and keeping my synced OneDrive on the Data partition.

Should be fine by why a separate data partition. If you were to every reinstall the OS you would need to recreate the OneDrive folders and re-download all your files. I'm sure OneDrive will ask for an empty folder and any existing files you move in to the new folder will create duplicates with the files in the cloud.

2. Can Bitlocker encrypt the two partitions separately? (Does that mean two log-ins on start-up?)

Yes, each partition will have it's own recovery key. Only the OS partition will need a PIN at startup if configured.

3. Will OneDrive play nicely in an encrypted partition?

If the partition is unlocked OneDrive won't have an issue.


I don't know if OneDrive has the ability like Google Drive to install to a location outside of the OS drive, probably not as OneDrive installs in a user's profile. For Google Drive I install the application on a non-OS disk and Google Drive (600GB) is synced to a third disk. When I recover my OS from a backup Google Drive doesn't go in to a full scan and resync, which it does if installed on the OS disk.