Bitlocker Questions

[musman]

I purchased a usb drive recently I formated it in exFAT format and used bitlocker that came with W7U to protect the drive. Had three questions.

1: How safe is bitlocker?
2: What are the disadvantages for using it?
3: Why can't I write files to the usb drive from a PC running Windows XP?

I tried to copy some files on my work computer and it says the drive is full, it's far from full. The work PC does not have bitlocker but will prompt me to enter my password when I do I can copy files from the drive but not too it.

[ViN86]

Originally Posted by musman

I purchased a usb drive recently I formated it in exFAT format and used bitlocker that came with W7U to protect the drive. Had three questions.

1: How safe is bitlocker?
2: What are the disadvantages for using it?
3: Why can't I write files to the usb drive from a PC running Windows XP?

I tried to copy some files on my work computer and it says the drive is full, it's far from full. The work PC does not have bitlocker but will prompt me to enter my password when I do I can copy files from the drive but not too it.

Pretty safe. All the files are encrypted and require either your computer or a password (whichever you choose when you create the device) to unlock the drive and read the files.

The main disadvantages to using it are you need a Vista or Win 7 machine. Also, there are CPU overhead costs associated with encrpytion. This can be a real problem on hard drives when you read/write large amounts of data to the disk. However, reading/writing on USB drives is relatively slow, so you won't really notice any CPU overhead.

You can't use the files on XP because XP doesn't have Bitlocker. The feature is only available for Vista and Windows 7 machines.

If you want encryption that you can run on any device, I would suggest you check out TrueCrypt. It's open source and allows you to create encrypted file lockers (which you mount to a drive to read/write from) or encrypt an entire device. Then you just install TrueCrypt (works on XP I believe) and you can read/write to the device on any machine.

http://www.truecrypt.org/

[musman]

Great info ViN86! Just what I needed to know. Kinda a bummer I can transfer files to a drive from my work computer so TrueCrypt looks very interesting. I'm a big fan of opensource software.