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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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your password, you’re locked out of your encrypted files permanently.

There’s no recovery. Also, if the computer dies and you try to retrieve your

data by installing the hard drive in another system, you’re likewise out of

luck. Even if you have an identical user name on the new system, the security

ID that defines that user account will differ from what you had on the old

system.

NOTE If you use EFS, you simply must have a valid password reset disk in

the event of some horrible catastrophe.

And one last caveat. If you copy an encrypted file to a drive formatted as

anything but NTFS, you’ll get a prompt saying that the copied file will not be

encrypted. If you copy to a drive with NTFS, the encryption stays. The

encrypted file—even if on a removable disk—will only be readable on your

system with your login.

BitLocker Drive Encryption

Windows Ultimate and Enterprise editions and Windows 8/8.1/10 Pro offer

full drive encryption through BitLocker Drive Encryption. BitLocker encrypts

the whole drive, including every user’s files, so it’s not dependent on any one

account. The beauty of BitLocker is that if your hard drive is stolen, such as

in the case of a stolen portable computer, all the data on the hard drive is safe.

The thief can’t get access, even if you have a user on that system who failed

to secure his or her data through EFS.

BitLocker requires a special Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip on the

motherboard to function. The TPM chip (which we looked at earlier, in

Chapter 5, “Firmware”) validates on boot that the computer has not changed

—that you still have the same operating system installed, for example, and

that the computer wasn’t hacked by some malevolent program. The TPM also

works in cases where you move the BitLocker drive from one system to

another.

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