Bitlocker Windows 11 Pro How to Setup and Enable Disk Encryption

Bitlocker Windows 11 Pro How to Setup and Enable Disk Encryption

hello everyone how are you doing this is win11guru here with another quick tutorial 

    in today's tutorial i'm going to show you guys how to set up bitlocker drive encryption on your windows 11 computer so bidlocker adds an additional line of security to store sensitive files on your computer and puts in behind a metaphorical lock that is called encryption which makes the information unreadable without the proper authorization information so if you don't have the code in order to open up the locked drive you won't be able to access it or you can access it but it won't make any sense to any person because it'll be a bunch of random characters so this should hopefully be a pretty straightforward process here guys and without further ado let's go ahead and jump right into it all you have to do is start by opening up the search icon and you want to type in group policy best match you'll come back with edit group policy go ahead and open that up i'm going to make this full screen here and i'm going to go and make this column a little wider here too and then i'm going to expand administrative templates underneath computer configuration so double click on it and there should be a windows components folder go ahead and double click on that one as well so now that we're on this page here you want to go and locate bitlocker drive encryption go ahead and double click on it and then there should be an operating system drives folder go ahead and left click on that one time on the right side locate something that says require additional authentication at startup go ahead and double click on that so you can see that this policy setting allows you to configure whether bitlocker requires additional authentication each time the computer starts and whether you're using bitlocker with or without a trusted platform module tpm this policy setting is applied when you turn on bitlocker note only one of the additional authentication options can be required at startup otherwise a policy error occurs if you want to use bitlocker on a computer without a tpm select the allowed bitlocker without a compatible tpm checkbox and there's a whole bunch of text here you're welcome to read all of it we're going to just kind of gloss over it and we're just going to set it to enabled up here at the top keep all the settings default on the left side here again unless you want to change it to something else which you're welcome to but anyway we're going to go ahead and select apply and okay close out of here and now you want to open up file explorer so if you want to select the file explorer icon down in your system task bar or you can search for it whichever you prefer and then on the left side select this pc on the right side right click on your local drive and you want to select where it says turn on bid locker so go ahead and left click on that so if you rather use a password or usb flash drive here you're welcome to do either or we're going to go ahead and select enter a password and then you're going to go ahead and enter a password to unlock the bitlocked drive so you should create a strong password that uses uppercase and lowercase numbers symbols and spaces at this point go ahead and enter in a password here so it could be anything there may be limitations though but i'm going to go ahead and just type it in so yeah you can see it has to be stronger so it does have complexity requirements so let me go ahead and add something here select next so got to add some more letters here or different numbers i guess and then select next and now you can save it to a variety of places here this is really important you definitely do not want to lose this key so you may want to back it up to a file that you can save to your desktop save it to a usb flash drive you can also print the recovery key and you can also save it to your microsoft account probably wouldn't hurt to do more than just one of these methods because it's very important you do not want to lose this passcode or recovery key it is so critical not to lose it i have so many tutorials guys where i make videos that i explicitly say that you do not want to lose this password and i don't know why i guess people come back on because they're looking up fixes for different tutorials and they come on a video about how to set up bitlocker and they say that they lost their key or you know i created a video about how to you know create a hidden folder and i say don't lose your key and then people comment saying they lost their key like you know what you didn't hear from me all right so remember back it up make sure it is saved do not come and ask me where to recover it from or how to fix it if you lost your key go somewhere else so anyway how do you want to pack up your recovery key go ahead and select one or more of these options and microsoft even suggest doing more than one and you want to go ahead and select again you have to actually select one of them if you want to go ahead and even move on to the next page here so i'm just going to select one here again doesn't really matter which one i would recommend doing more than one in your case here but pretty straightforward here guys i just say there's a pdf on my desktop i'll actually open it up so you can see what the key will look like if you were to print it out or save it as a pdf so you're about to see that here and give it a moment here so this is going to tell you your identifier key as well as a recovery key do not lose this key like i'm telling you like this is my key that i just set up here but in your case you are going to want to keep this key somewhere that you're not going to lose it so very very important so anyway go ahead and just select next and now you can encrypt using disk space only or you can encrypt the entire drive so encrypt use disk space only is faster and best for new pcs and drivers or you can encrypt entire drive which is slower but best for pcs and drives already in use i'm going to go ahead and select the encrypt to use disk space only so to be a little bit quicker for our tutorial here and then i'm going to select next and now i'm going to go ahead and select the new encryption mode you can do a compatibility mode but i'm going to select new encryption mode if you're watching this tutorial down the road here guys there might not be more than one option in which case you just would go along with whatever option it presented and then select next and then you also do want to run a bit locker system check which will ensure the bid locker can read the recovery encryption keys correctly before encrypting the drive so it's definitely a good precaution here so make sure you have everything saved all the backup keys like i said and then select continue because if you lose the key you're not going to be able to get back onto your drive so i mean that'd be kind of crazy here so go ahead and save and close of any open programs and applications and go ahead and restart your computer and it will take a little longer to restart your computer this time than normal but just give it a moment and then at this point go ahead and insert your password and again that's different than your recovery key so just keep that in mind there's two different things here so you've got a password then you have the key you definitely don't want to lose the key that's the last thing you want to lose so go ahead and hit enter and that should be about it and i will make a separate tutorial about how to turn bitlocker off again assuming you have your recovery key and password if you don't have that you're not going to be able to do that so that's just a quick little disclaimer there so you can go ahead and search my channel for that i'll have a video for how to turn off bidlocker but this tutorial just pertains to turning it on which i think we were able to achieve successfully and you could do this for other drives too it doesn't just have to be the c drive or windows it can be a flash drive or another drive too so pretty straightforward process guys do hope i was able to help you out and i do look forward to catching you all in the next tutorial goodbye