Microsoft locks Windows 11 user out, shows how easy losing data from forced encryption is
Microsoft locks Windows 11 user out, shows how easy losing data from forced encryption is
The forced Microsoft Account requirement and BitLocker auto encryption can lead to catastrophic issues on Windows if you aren't careful, and especially in the case of a lockout.
Forced bitlocker encryption without keeping the keys in a separate area accessible to you, is just adding ransomware to your own device.
Am I missing something? Doesn't Microsoft provide keys associated with your accounts? I had to unlock mine once and I just had to access it on my account page.
The title is wrong. Most, if not all new phones have forced encryption. Macs have forced encryption (I think can be disabled, but it's encrypted by default).
Windows shows how crap software can lose you data.
this Encryption should be under good design circumstances, transparent. I'd wager that almost all apple operating system users have little to no idea everything is locally encrypted.
This is why I have multiple backups. But I'm a nerd who likes computers and has money. Not everyone has the means or knowledge to do the same. Users are getting screwed more and more by corporations and the decisions they force on their customers. Capitalism is long past the part where we could pretend that it was good for regular people. We're in the finding-out phase from here on.
I am a nerd without money - I have 3 drives 2 that live offsite. 6gb humble spinny drives. Everything that's important to me gets copied to these drives- I'm not using any fancy software - its a cut and paste job from a few Linux laptops and a desktop. I still have all my original wav file and games backup from 1998 with this method ( though then they were on 10 zip discs ) It just takes a little due diligence to back up your data.
I don't think I grasp this at all. They say the encryption is forced, so that means that I can't just access my files with Linux or whatever? But then at the end they say to use an extra hard drive as backup, so that can't be right. Is their problem that the cloud storage is encrypted? Wouldn't it be a huge, glaring issue if it wasn't? Regardless, I would expect to be locked out of my files on a cloud storage service I got locked out of, so I don't know what encryption has to do with it. I don't get it.
I had an offline windows account on my laptop.
I was freelancing for a company that gave me a Microsoft account.
I logged into teams, but was very careful not to assign my laptop to that account. I had to use teams, but I didn't want my client to manage my device.Shortly after I installed Linux, which broke windows bitlocker, and I had to get my bitlocker key.
I hadn't set up bitlocker, I wasn't expecting it. As far as I was concerned, I had bricked my device.
On a hunch of "hmm, maybe", I checked my Microsoft account from the client, and it has a bitlocker key which unlocked my windows install.At which point, I disabled bitlocker and now primary Linux.
But yeh, in my experience bitlocker is transparently applied during windows install and you never know your bitlocker key. If you never log in to a Microsoft account, you will never be able to recover it if you don't save it in advance. And if you don't know its happened, why would you know to save it in advance?!
The fact that I was able to recover my bitlocker key for my offline/local windows account because I had installed & logged-in to teams via a client provided Microsoft account is strange as fuck.Linux supports BitLocker encrypted partitions. You just have to specify the BitLocker recovery-key in your
fstabfile or on the command-line. I've been dual-booting with disk encryption enabled on both Linux and Windows for several years, using that functionality