Hey, howdy, hallo,
A few days ago, I was doing some computer work for a friend. They were running out of hard drive space on their Windows computer, and were wondering what options they had. I confirmed their hard drive wasn’t soldered to their motherboard, and I suggested we upgrade it.
The Process
When I connected the drive to take an image, all their files were visible.
My first computer, that was mine, was a Blue Dell Inspirion 1100, running Windows. At the time, full-disk encryption wasn’t really a thing Operating Systems supported natively. There were a few third part tools that offered it, the one I used was TrueCrypt.
Fast-forward, and we now have:
And just because I know many people reading this are here from my GrapheneOS videos, your GrapheneOS device has file system-based disk encryption by default.
As I mentioned, when I attached my friend’s drive externally to my computer, I was able to see all their files. This is because they had BitLocker turned off. Full-disk encryption has many benefits, but the main one is protecting your device if it’s lost or stolen. If their laptop were stolen, all their files would be available for anyone to access with a $10 (9.22 €) adapter. It doesn’t matter how long or complex your password is, your data is not encrypted.
With Full-Disk Encryption, they may have your device, but they won’t have your data.
macOS — Even though most hard drives are soldiered to the motherboard on Apple devices, without Full-disk encryption (FileVault) your password can be reset and someone can easily gain access to your files.
While I see no reason not to enable full-disk encryption, there is one thing to be aware of. If you forget your password, your data is gone forever. There’s no way to reset your password and recover your files. The data is encrypted with your password and therefore, if you forget it or lose it, your data cannot be decrypted.
I hope you had a great February, and I’ll see you in March.
-Josh
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