Bitlocker on Windows 11 Home

[Executioner]

I took a trip back east a few weeks back, and I was a little concerned in taking my laptop with me. I have Windows 11 Home, and I guess the option for Bitlocker is not available on the Home version which is crazy. Why would MS do this to home users? After some reading, they say having the Pro version making Bitlocker easy to use and manage.

Is there a way to enable Bitlocker on a Home version?

I did some searching on the net, but several articles were confusing and did not work for me.

[FlyingPenguin]

Nope. Pro only.

You can use Vera crypt: https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html

Just be aware, it will take a while to initially encrypt the part of the drive that has data on it. Everything on the drive has to be read and then saved encrypted. It could take several hours. Best done over night. Make sure the laptop has reliable power.

Things can go wrong. I Highly recommend you backup any important data before encrypting.

[Executioner]

I know you travel a lot. Do you encrypt your devices when traveling?

[FlyingPenguin]

No. I never travel with anything I am concerned about. Everything stays at home, and I just remote into my workstation.

Only thing I carry on me that's important is my passwords, which are in an encrypted file on my flash drive and phone (and all modern phones are also encrypted from the factory now).

I have a friend who only keeps anything important when traveling on one of those secure encrypted flash drives, one of the ones with a combination keypad on it. He actually went so far to put an entire bootable Linux OS on it, and never used the laptop's OS for anything important. But that always seemed a bit of a pain for my use case.

I don't use encryption on my PC's at home because of the tradeoff of loss of data, if there's a catastrophic failure. You can at least open an unbootable drive, or one with bad sectors, and copy some of your data off of it. If it's encrypted, it's not so simple.

On my home workstation I do encrypt individual files that I deem important. It's tedious, but over a couple of decades it's become a habit. I have a long, ugly password I've used for a couple of decades as a password for PDFs, and archive files. I consider that more useful than hard drive encryption at home. Even if your drive is encrypted, it's unencrypted while you're using it, so any malware can read your files as easily as you can.

Security is a tradeoff. You do what works best for you.

[Executioner]

Yeah what I did was to encrypt my important documents I have on this laptop, using a 15 character password. I also learned that Acronis will disable Bitlocker if detected before doing a backup.

[Losbot]

I have PGP Desktop and create an encrypted drive to store sensitive data. When needed, I simply mount it and enter a 41 character sentence to unlock it. When done, I unmount it or it unmounts itself after 1hr of idle. The PGP file itself is on my server and backed up weekly to 1 of my 3 NAS units in a rotation so that if it somehow becomes corrupt, I know I can go back to the last 3 versions.

[Executioner]

What is a PGP Desktop?

[Losbot]

A rather versatile app that utilizes PGP encryption to encrypt just about anything. Might not be the solution for you though. It's just something I've used since the 90s, back before it became commercialized and was bought. Some say it was compromised after that so I still use the older stuff and encrypt with a 4096 bit key.