BitLocker to Go is a new feature of Windows 7 that allows you to encrypts your USB devices with a passwords. This feature is very useful if want to ensure that your sensitive/private information will not get into the  wrong hand if you were ever to lose one of these devices.

Now before we begin if you do want to use this feature you will need to have installed Windows 7 Ultimate (or Enterprise) edition as this feature is only available in this version of the OS.

How do I encrypt a USB device?

Step 1. Insert your USB device you want to encrypt into your computer running Windows 7 Ultimate edition.

Step 2. Right click on the USB device in Windows Explorer and click on the “Turn on BitLocker…”

Step 3. Tick the “Use a password to unlock the drive” and then type the same password in the two password field’s and then click “Next”.

Note: As it says you should try an make this password as complicated as possible with a combination of lower and upper case letter, numbers, spaces, and/or symbols.

Step 4. You are now FORCED to either save a file or print the recovery key for the device. This ensure that you ahve a copy of the 48 digit recovery in case you ever forget the password.

Note: that you cannot save the recovery key to the device that you want encrypt as this would be useless if you were to ever forget the unlock key.

Step 5. Once you have saved or printed the recovery key you will see either of the following down the bottom left hand part of the dialog box and then you will be able to continue by pressing “Next”.

Step 6. You are ready to encrypt the drive and all you have to do is click “Start Encrypting”.

Note: Now be warned this can take a LONG time. On my Western Digital 1tb USB external hard drive this process took about 12 hours to complete.

First thing the process does is install the BitLocker to Go reader application that will let you read the file on the device on down-level OS’s such as Windows XP and Vista.

Now the drive will start to encrypt.

Note: You might notice you can pause this encryption of this device and remove if it is taking longer than you thought but from this point you will need to enter the encryption key to access the data on the drive even though it is not fully encrypted and the drive will be read only until the encryption has been completed.

Once completed click “Close” and the drive is now encrypted and ready to use.

The way to tell if a drive is encrypted it by the padlock symbol you can see on the drive icon in Windows Explorer you can see against “Nano (E:)”. An open grey padlock represents an unlocked drive and and closed yellow padlock represents a locked drive.

How do I unlock and encrypt a USB device?

Step 1. Insert the USB device into a Windows 7 computer and you should be automatically prompted for a password to decrypt the device. Type the password in the password field and tick “Unlock”.

Note: If you tick the “Automatically unlock on this computer from now on” then the unlock password for this device will be stored on the registry of the computer so be very sure you trust this computer before using this option.

Step 2. Your DONE! the drive will now behave exactly as per normal.

Alternatively if the device is already connected and you need to unlock it just right click on the device in Windows Explorer and click the “Unlock Drive…” option. You will then be prompted with the same unlock drive dialogue box as seen above.

By Alan Burchill

Follow me on twitter at @alanburchill

If want to know how to implement BitLocker to go in an large organisation then you can also check out this other article I wrote called How to use Group Policy to force BitLocker to Go recovery keys to be stored in Active Directory

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. Read the rest at windows7center.com.