how to use Bitlocker and Bitlocker To Go

Video Demonstration - Bitlocker and Bitlocker to Go (9.5 min) Hello, everyone! We are here to cover BitLocker and BitLocker To Go. This is the conversation of encrypting your drive, whether it's the fixed data drive which is the hard drive inside of your tower or laptop, or if we're going to be talking BitLocker To Go which is going to be using USB flash drives and removable storage. Either way, we want to encrypt our contents so our data is safe.

Let's get to it. I'm going to go ahead and click on my start button for Windows, and we go to Control Panel. And I go to Control Panel, here we are! In both Windows 10 and in Windows 8 and Windows 7, you're going to be able to utilize BitLocker. Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate works with it. So does Windows 8 Pro and Enterprise. On top of that, if you got Windows 10 like me, Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise, and Education all support BitLocker. So I'm going to go ahead and click on BitLocker Drive Encryption inside of my Control Panel, and when this opens up, what we're going to see here is my operating system drive, which is my fixed data drive. It's my C disc. We have that, and I have removable data drive which is my flash drive named IMPORTANT which is my E drive. Now we're going to start first with the removable drive, because these are the things you take with you wherever you go, and they're very easy to lose, and if you ever have sensitive data on one, I'd like the contents to be encrypted where people can't access it unless they can use the decrypt password. So I'm going to go ahead here and click on Turn on BitLocker on the flash drive that I plugged into my machine. Now BitLocker starts up, it looks up my flash drive, and says how do you want to unlock this drive? This is going to be the way that we can decrypt the contents of my flash drive. Now, I can use a password or a smart card, or both as a combination. Now, smart card is something you have to insert into your machine, and as long as that's inserted, we're going to be able to have the contents of the flash drive decrypted. I'm not going to have a smart card on me, so I'm going with use a password. So I'll create my password and type it in twice, and this password is what I will use to decrypt the contents of my flash drive whenever I plug it in to any machine. With that being done, we get a little hey, make sure you have a recovery key. If you do lose that password or you lose your smart card, if we had selected that, the recovery key can be used to access our drive. Either you are very weary of saving it to a file on a machine, but you could always save it to a cloud account, but I prefer to print it, and after I print it, I'm going to put it in a safe in my office. We can go ahead and click next, and now we get a confusing question: Do you want to encrypt the used disc space or do you want to encrypt the entire flash drive? If you've ever deleted confidential or personal information from your flash drive, you want to encrypt the entire drive because if you're only encrypting the used disc space, you're only encrypting the current files on the drive. But, if you ever deleted files, that space that can be literally pulled out of the drive and reconstructed them, your deleted files with analysis tools, it's not going to be encrypted. So we're going to encrypt the entire drive, which includes any empty space, and used space. And that empty space might not really be empty, there could be deleted files there. So I'm going to encrypt the entire drive. Now, if I'm going to use this flash drive on different computer systems, including different Windows Operating Systems, I want to make sure I use compatible mode. If you're only going to be using this flash drive on the latest Windows 10 systems as you move around your flash drive, you can click and be very comfy with the new encryption mode. But the issue is if you try to use this flash drive with this newer encryption mode which is Windows 10 later versions, it might not be compatible with other operating systems that you're trying to open up your flash drive on. So I'm going to choose compatible mode because this is a USB flash drive and I will be moving and plugging it into different computers. With that selected, it says you will be able to unlock this drive using the password you created. We're about to encrypt it and I'm going to click start encrypting. This is a small flash drive. The encryption process can go pretty quickly. It's actually a 256-meg flash drive, which is awesome for this video because a 16 gig would take a while. So it's encrypting the drive, and while it's doing that, you can see some of the options down below. When we're done with encrypting our drive, we can back up the recovery key again and change that password being used, get rid of the password 

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