Protect Portable Storage With BitLocker in Windows 8

Protect Portable Storage with BitLocker To Go

 

Windows 8 offers the best way to protect portable storage devices like USB connected drives and hard drives which does not exist in Windows prior to Vista. Microsoft offers BitLocker based on full disk encryption technologies.

 

Note: In Windows 8, BitLocker and BitLocker To Go require Windows 8 Pro or Enterprise.

 

Both BitLocker and BitLocker To Go provide a full disk encryption facility, unlike the other older Microsoft encryption features. It is applied at the file or folder level. But now Windows 8 provides it in a slightly different feature present in the Control Panel called BitLocker Drive Encryption.

 

To apply the BitLocker feature from the Control Panel  do the following steps.

 

Step 1

 

Open the start screen in Windows 8; see:

 

Step 2

 

Enter Control Panel into the search box.

 

Step 3

 

The All control panel items window opens where you select the BitLocker Drive encryption option.

 

Step 4

 

Select the turn on BitLocker option of the D Drive within the BitLocker Drive encryption window.

 

Step 5

 

Checked the use a password to unlock the Drive. And enter the password.

 

Step 6

 

Click on the save to a file option. For this you can save a recovery key as a file in your system.

 

Step 7

 

Go to the location where you want to save the key as a file.

 

Step 8

 

Check the Encrypt used disk space only (faster and best for new PC's and drives) option.

 

Step 9

 

Click on the Start encryptng button. For starting the encryption of drive D:

 

 

Step 10

Then you will see the Encryption process.

 

Step 11

 

Finally the Encryption process completes successfully.