While you can't unlock a USB drive with a thumbprint (yet), there are some simple and powerful encryption tools available to make your USB flash drive more secure. We use passwords and biometric scanners to protect our phones, our credit and debit cards, our computers and pretty much anything we'd rather not have people snooping through. If you’re encrypting a brand-new PC without any files, then the option to encrypt only the used disk space is best for you, because new files will be encrypted as they’re added. If you have an older PC with a few more miles on the hard drive, you should choose to encrypt the entire drive.Security is a critical part of living our digital lives in the 21st century.
On the following screen, you have to decide whether to encrypt only the disk space used so far, or encrypt your PC’s entire drive. Once you’ve created two different instances of the recovery key and removed any USB drives, click Next.Ĭhoose whichever option best describes your PC. That said, saving your key to Microsoft’s servers will make it possible to decrypt your files if you ever lose the flash drive or paper containing your recovery key code. I decided against saving the file to my Microsoft account, because I don’t know who has access to the company’s servers. In my case, I chose to save the file to a USB key and print the key on paper. You are able to choose as many of these options as you’d like, and you should choose at least two. Windows gives you three choices for saving this key in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10: Save the file to your Microsoft account, save to a file, save to a flash drive (Windows 10), or print the recovery key. Next, you have to save a recovery key just in case you have problems unlocking your PC.
Choose whichever method you prefer, but I recommend sticking with the manual password so you aren’t depending on a single USB key for authentication. Windows gives you a choice of either entering the password manually or inserting a USB key. We’re almost at the point where we’ll encrypt the drive! When you’re ready, click Next.īefore you encrypt your drive, however, you will be asked to enter a password that must be entered every time you turn on your PC, before you even get to the Windows login screen. We’ve rebooted and the TPM is now active.Īfter a few minutes, you should see a window with a green check mark next to Turn on the TPM security hardware.
In my case I had to hit F10 to confirm the change or press Esc to cancel. After that, your computer should reboot and once you log in again you’ll see the BitLocker window. Once you restart your PC, you may see a warning that your system was changed. Before you do, make sure any flash drives, CDs, or DVDs are ejected from your PC. Then you’ll have to manually restart your PC. To activate your TPM security hardware Windows has to shut down completely.
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