Save your BitLocker Key

 

Save your BitLocker key

If you have bought a new Windows 10 computer or you have a Windows 10 computer up to five years young, this email is for you.  This does not apply to Home editions.

From quite some time manufacturers like Dell and HP by default put the BitLocker drive encryption ON. With this encryption, if your hard drive or laptop gets stolen, no one can read the data. That is the good part. However, this also means that if there is any small defect in your drive and your computer does not boot up, there is NO WAY you can get your data back unless you have saved your BitLocker recovery key.

Your BitLocker recovery key is automatically saved in your Microsoft account for you, if you did create yourself. Most of the times the vendors do it for the customers and they themselves forget the credentials.

In case you do not find the BitLocker option as shown in the below screenshot, then either it is turned OFF or your computer does not have the feature. So you can ignore the rest of the write-up.

Step 1 -Right click on BitLocker encrypted (C:) drive (from This computer)  and select “Manage BitLocker”.

Step 2 - In the BitLocker Drive Encryption control panel for regenerating a copy of recovery key select “Back up your recovery key”.

 

Step 3 - For saving BitLocker recovery key we have 4 options. Choose the appropriate option to save your recovery key – save to a file, USB flash drive, or printing the key are the simplest method. Please note that anyone can use the recovery key to gain access to the drive, even if they don’t know the unlock password of your encrypted drive, so please do not disclose it to others.

Save to a USB flash drive: First we have to insert a USB flash drive in our PC, after that click on “Save to a USB flash drive”.

Now select the USB device from the list and click on “Save”.

A copy of BitLocker recovery key will be saved on your USB device as shown in below example fig.

Save to a file: For saving the recovery key as a .txt file on local drive select “Save to a file”.

Click on Save button to save the recovery key on your local as shown below.

Print the recovery key: To print the recovery key, select “Print the recovery key”.

 

Select the printer from the list and hit Print button to print the recovery key.