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Encryption is a wonderful thing. While I don’t do full drive encryption on my Windows desktop at home – courtesy of BitLocker – it’s just because I’m the only one who ever uses my system and I don’t hold anything of value to it. (All of my personal documents and everything else I would encrypt live on one NAS box this is usually off.)
I do this partly because I’m lazy, partly because I want my PC to perform at its peak, and partly because I fear the day the encryption will fail – or because I don’t think about everything I have to do, if or when I have to reinstall Windows 10 – and I can’t access my data.
It’s a Lifehacker reader situation Jon is all too familiar with. As he writes for this week Tech 911 Questions and answers:
“I have a Western Digital external hard drive and a folder on the hard drive is encrypted with Windows Bitlocker. I forgot I did this, reinstalled Windows and can’t access the files anymore. Is there any way to fix this? “
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You wrote down your recovery key, right?
This is exactly the scenario that I don’t want to deal with, which is why I prefer not to use Bitlocker. I stick with something like that VeraCryptJust so that my operating system is not tied to the encryption process. That, and I just have to remember one gigantic password that I can store in a password manager, write down, and record under my desk, or store it by any other possible anti-spy method.
You should have been asked to save a BitLocker recovery key if you enabled encryption on your external drive. If you cannot remember or have no idea where you kept that key, this is the main problem we will address.
Unlock an Encrypted Drive Is simple. In theory, all you have to do is launch File Explorer, right-click the drive, and unlock it. You will be prompted for the password or PIN that you set up when you initialized BitLocker.
If you don’t know the password or PIN that you used to set up BitLocker, this is where you’ll find the recovery key. It’s basically your digital lifesaver. If you don’t have it, you are lost. That is the nature of encryption. Was there an easy way to bypass it and get access to your files? Then what would be the point of encrypting the drive? Anyone who has physical or remote access to your system can intrude directly into your data after a few minutes of work and initially invalidate the point of a recovery key completely.
Still, you have a lifeline, even if all the talk about a recovery key doesn’t shake your memory. You may have saved this key in your Microsoft account when you set up your BitLocker encryption. If so, you can find it with this link. Microsoft’s key archive is pretty extensive, assuming you’ve ever saved it on your account. Just looked at the link and found my keys for desktop PCs that have been around for years.
If it doesn’t exist and you have no other storage to have the key stored in, consider your data lost. Well, technically it’s still there, you just have no way of accessing it. And no, there are no workarounds you can use and no brute force techniques you can use to try to regain access. As the developer of the popular M3 Data Recovery Tool describe::
“As we know, BitLocker is a hard drive-level encryption solution. So if you forget the BitLocker password and have lost the BitLocker recovery key, the data recovery software (including M3 BitLocker Recovery) cannot and will not break into your BitLocker encrypted drive. This is both a political and a technological limitation. “
I hope this link will help you. If not, you may want to go through your preferred generic passwords to see if you might have used one of them when you set up your BitLocker drive. That being said, this is a valuable reminder that even external drives should be backed up somewhere – ideally an unencrypted location that you protect with physical access, or even a cloud storage provider that can handle the encryption itself.
Do you have a technical question that keeps you up at night? Tired of troubleshooting your Windows or Mac? Are you looking for advice on apps, browser extensions, or utilities to accomplish a specific task? Let us know! Let us know in the comments below or by email david.murphy@lifehacker.com.
