Setting up Bitlocker is relatively painless, so follow along. It’s also a good option for external drives, as most of us have lost a few of those over the course of our lives, and lord knows what we had on them when we did so. Encrypting an entire drive does incur a performance penalty, but if it’s your work laptop and everything you are working on is on your C:/ drive, it’s a good option to consider. Bitlocker offers full-drive encryption only, however, but thankfully you can choose between encrypting the entire drive, or just the space that’s being used. Windows 10 or 11 Pro offers two built-in encryption tools: There is this simple tool, which can be used to encrypt any file-however, in our testing we had issues with it, so we recommend using the other option, Bitlocker. How to use Bitlocker for full-drive encryption Whether you want full-drive encryption, or just a secure space to keep your important records, one of these tools will fit the bill. Windows 10/11 Pro users have encryption tools built into the OS while users of the Home variant must use a free third-party utility. Luckily, in Windows you have options on how to do this for absolutely no cost whatsoever. The upside is that anyone attempting to access it without the password will fail, and the downside is that if you lose the encryption key (usually a password), whatever you had encrypted will be gone forever, unless there’s a way to recover it. This means that it’s time to get into encryption, which is where a drive, file, or folder is encoded (encrypted) so as to make it unreadable to anyone except the person with the right key to decrypt it. Whether it’s our tax returns, financial records, password lists (seriously, just use a password manager already), or just files you don’t want anyone to see under any circumstances, we all have our reasons for wanting a bit more security. Most of us have some rather sensitive files on our PCs.

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